WOMEN TALKING

Directing: B+
Acting: A
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

There is a scene near the end of Women Talking, which consists mostly of dense and high-stakes conversation between eight women meeting secretly in a barn, in which the majority of their Mennonite community are seen together. I won’t spoil the context, except to day that in spite of the scene’s relatively subtlety and fleetingness, I have not seen any more powerful image in film over the past year.

Women Talking is a deeply affecting film, with far more things to say about power and patiarchy than this seemingly small and self-contained story might suggest. It’s the means of getting to that powerful moment that counts, not necessarily how the journey begins.

Because, to be clear, the opening scenes feel not just like a filmed play (even though director Sarah Polley adapted it from the novel of the same name by Miram Toews, who also co-wrote the script, and not a play), but like the dialogue is over-written. This is a film whose title is the ultimate in truth in advertising: it is almost exclusively women talking, and they sure are a wildly articulate bunch, particularly for being deliberately uneducated sectarian women to such a degree that they can’t even read or write.

The one exception is the film’s literal manifestation of “not all men” (a phrase that one of the women actually utters), August, played by the perennially reliable Ben Wishaw. He is the colony’s schoolteacher—of boys exclusively—recently returned from college after his family’s exile, and he has been tasked with “keeping the minutes” of this meeting, in which the women must decide whether to stay or leave the colony. To be fair to Wishaw himself, he gives every bit as good a performance as anyone else in the cast, notwithstanding the muddled nature of his character’s presence. August often seems to be present just to bear brunt of, or act as a barrier between, these women’s rage against the other men of the colony.

The rest of the cast is a list of powerhouse women, with which Wishaw has no hope of competing: the women in the meeting include Rooney Mara as Ona, the one “spinster” present; Claire Foy as Salome, whose righteous anger prevents her from the forgiveness their faith tasks her with; and a stunning (and, as is often the case with her, unrecognizable) Jessie Buckley as Mariche, whose own anger has her passionately defending the perceived security of the colony. These three deliver the level of performance their reputations lead us to expect from them, but I was just as impressed with some of the lesser-known actors: two women playing mothers (Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy), and especially the rather distinctive Michelle McLeod as Mejal. The latter women demonstrates how people who endure the same trauma can react in wildly different ways, something the rest of the women, who again are given no education or even knowledge of the world, struggle to understand.

And, to be clear, this is a story about trauma, and of a very specific sort: inspired by similar real-life events that occurred in Bolivia, these women have only recently learned that the “evil” that has descended on all of them was not devils and demons as the local men have led them to believe, but the men themselves, incapacitating them with animal anesthetic and raping them. We are meant to understand this has been going on for years, although the script of the film doesn’t emphasize that very much, which makes it easy to glean over.

That said, there are many flashbacks, clearly designed to break up the monotony of endless debates between women in a barn. These days, it would be shocking for any film to depict racial violence or violence against women directly onscreen, as there is now a deeper understanding of how that forces audiences to relive their traumas. It remains a relief that none of this violence is seen onscreen in Women Talking, which is much more concerned with the nuances discussion from the point of view of the deeply pious, who believe in forgiveness, but must reconcile that with self-protection.

The debate, at first, is a choice between three options: do nothing; stay and fight; or leave. Because one young male attacker has been caught and the women are so wildly upset that several men have been arrested “for their own protection,” the women are left largely alone for a day when the rest of the men have gone to post bail. This is their time constraint: they must make a communal decision before the men return.

I thought a lot about the danger and uncertainty of the option to leave, considering these women have never known anything else, and have little concept of the world outside their colony. Polley deftly balances this with the terror that also comes with any decision to stay, and in so doing underscores the resilience of women throughout history.

There is one character I can’t decide how to feel about, an evidently trans teen boy named Melvin, played by nonbinary actor August Winter. Women Talking seems to suggest that Melvin was pushed into his trans-ness by the same trauma the grown women went through, which strikes me as problematic at best. He also refuses to speak to any adult, only to the colony’s children, presumably for the same reason. And the strangest thing about it, to me, is the idea that Melvin could exist so freely in a Mennonite colony we’re supposed to understand is ruled over by violent misogynists. In what universe would such men allow someone like Melvin to join their ranks? Even the grown women here, whose side we are rightly on otherwise, are still deeply religious and conservative, and their relative ease in accepting Melvin stretches plausibility. Still, it’s nice to see a trans boy accepted for who he is, I guess. I just had a hard time making sense of the context.

The flip side of that plausibility, to a degree, is the elder woman played by Frances McDormand, the one woman in the colony who refuses even to entertain the idea of leaving, thanks to the conviction that doing so would deny them entry into heaven. McDormand’s character is steadfast in her contrarian position, but especially for a character and name featured prominently in marketing materials, she is barely in this movie. We see her in all of three or four scenes, each so brief as to make it impossible for McDormand to showcase her well known talents.

Narratively speaking, largely thanks to the hyperconscious style of the dialogue, Women Talking takes a little while to click with. But, perhaps that is the point: give these women time to make their case as they engage in earnest and urgent debate, and they will win you over. By the time this movie ended, I was deeply moved by it.

Every one a unique perspective, each of them valid.

Overall: B+