The Tale pro­vides a vital insight into his­toric sex­u­al abuse

At the begin­ning of The Tale, Lau­ra Dern’s voiceover informs the view­er that, ​“The sto­ry you are about to see is true, as far as I know.” An exer­cise in remem­ber­ing, mis­re­mem­ber­ing and try­ing to make order out of chaos, Jen­nifer Fox’s debut nar­ra­tive fea­ture is based in fact – the sto­ry of the sex­u­al abuse she expe­ri­enced as a child. ​“You know, I always saw this sto­ry as fic­tion,” Fox told LWLies ahead of the film’s UK pre­mière at Sun­dance Lon­don. ​“There is no evi­dence, there’s no one who would speak. If I had tak­en my cam­era around on the jour­ney you see in the film, who would talk? Nobody. Also, it’s real­ly a film about the mind, and con­struc­tion of self, and so how do you show that in a doc­u­men­tary? How do you show the past?”

In fic­tion­al­is­ing her mem­o­ries, the role of Jen­nifer is split between Dern, who plays her at 48-years-old, a suc­cess­ful doc­u­men­tar­i­an with a lov­ing fiancé, and Isabelle Nélisse as her 13-year-old incar­na­tion, a qui­et and del­i­cate child who feels invis­i­ble at home as one of five chil­dren. After spend­ing a mag­i­cal sum­mer at a rid­ing school under the tute­lage of Mrs G (Eliz­a­beth Debic­ki) and her lover Bill Allen (Jason Rit­ter), she becomes close to the cou­ple. What starts as a seem­ing­ly inno­cent rela­tion­ship – where­by the teenage Jen­nifer gets the atten­tion and parental fig­ures she’s always craved – soon becomes insid­i­ous, while the adult Jen­nifer attempts to uncov­er the true nature of her con­nec­tion to those she was so close to in her childhood.

The Tale has already been her­ald­ed as ​‘the moth­er of all #MeToo movies’, but to cat­e­gorise it sole­ly as a film about abuse would be remiss. First and fore­most, this is a sto­ry about the fal­li­bil­i­ty of mem­o­ry, and how we frame and reframe events with­in our own minds. Ear­ly in the film, the elder Jen­nifer mis­re­mem­bers how young she appeared at 13 years old, envi­sion­ing a teenag­er where there was actu­al­ly a child. Con­front­ed with pho­tographs she is star­tled by the real­i­sa­tion that the image she built of her­self – that of a world­ly young woman – was not so in real­i­ty. Fox’s manip­u­la­tion of the cam­era mim­ics the mal­leabil­i­ty of her mem­o­ries – as her age changes, so do her clothes, her words, the weath­er. ​“When I was a child I was obsessed with chang­ing myself,” the adult Jen­nifer says. ​“Now I don’t even remem­ber who I used to be.”

It pro­vides a ter­ri­fy­ing insight into how per­pe­tra­tors of abuse not only legit­imise their actions but jus­ti­fy them – time and time again, Bill tells Jen­nifer he’s doing her a favour by tak­ing a sex­u­al inter­est in her; he whis­pers, ​“Do you know how lucky you are?” high­light­ing the way in which abusers sit­u­ate them­selves with­in their vic­tims’ lives, and how they are able to manip­u­late through rein­forc­ing the notion of exclu­siv­i­ty and being spe­cial. ​“We don’t always con­sid­er the com­plex­i­ty of what a child feels,” Fox says of this trou­bling idea. ​“Not to take away that it’s abuse, but we don’t real­ly allow that the child can feel love, and feel spe­cial, and feel grief at the loss of that adult figure.”

Fox urges under­stand­ing of vic­tim­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rela­tion to chil­dren, and com­pas­sion when con­fronting the past. ​“I only used the word sex­u­al abuse for the first time when I was 45,” she explains. ​“When I realised that that’s what hap­pened to me and that it’s uni­ver­sal and that it hap­pens to women all over, I also realised that the rea­son I could nev­er say that to myself is because being a vic­tim would have killed me more than the abuse itself.”

Own­ing one’s per­ceived vic­tim­hood high­lights the need for women to tell their own sto­ries, rather than serve sole­ly as inspi­ra­tion for male film­mak­ers – per­ti­nent at present, as Ryan Mur­phy con­sid­ers mak­ing a TV series based on the #MeToo move­ment. These sto­ries belong to those that lived them. It’s vital we learn to listen.

The Tale pre­mieres on Tues­day 5 June on Sky Atlantic at 10pm.