Women Talk­ing

Sarah Pol­ley has a mes­sage for you. It comes from the 2018 nov­el ​‘Women Talk­ing’ by Miri­am Toews, although Pol­ley has refor­mu­lat­ed that dia­logue from text to film. The plot is sim­ple – eight Men­non­ite women have gath­ered to decide whether the women of their colony should remain with, fight, or leave the men who have repeat­ed­ly drugged and raped them. The mes­sage, how­ev­er, is rich, com­plex, and mul­ti­fac­eted in its depic­tion of what dis­course held exclu­sive­ly among women looks like. That is, a dis­course whol­ly dif­fer­ent to that held between women in any film writ­ten and direct­ed by men.

In her 1975 essay ​‘Visu­al Plea­sure and Nar­ra­tive Cin­e­ma’, the­o­rist Lau­ra Mul­vey con­clud­ed that the only way to break down the male gaze in cin­e­ma ​“is to free the look of the cam­era into its mate­ri­al­i­ty in time and space and the look of the audi­ence into dialec­tics, pas­sion­ate detach­ment”. In doing so, we lose the con­ven­tion­al plea­sures which main­stream, male-direct­ed films give us, but we regain a sense of sex­u­al equity.

When film­mak­ers fore­ground dialec­tics and cre­ate that sense of detach­ment, they gen­er­al­ly move out of the main­stream into the avant-garde. What Pol­ley does so remark­ably in Women Talk­ing is to achieve Mulvey’s cri­te­ria for a suc­cess­ful fem­i­nist cin­e­ma with­in the Hol­ly­wood model.

Women Talk­ing begins with on-screen text: ​“What fol­lows is an act of female imag­i­na­tion.” It aligns itself with a tra­di­tion of the­atri­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion in film, an icon­o­clas­tic decon­struc­tion of how cin­e­ma has con­ven­tion­al­ly been used to mere­ly tell sto­ries. The films of French duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huil­let come to mind, whose use of vocalised text and sta­t­ic imagery allowed them to cre­ate rad­i­cal com­mu­nist films. What Pol­ley sub­verts from this exper­i­men­tal mode is to cast some of West­ern cinema’s biggest stars in roles which, in a micro-bud­get film, are typ­i­cal­ly played by non-pro­fes­sion­al actors. Enter Frances McDor­mand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buck­ley…

The pres­ence of these actors auto­mat­i­cal­ly gives us a way into the film through an invit­ing sense of famil­iar­i­ty. It is the same form of invi­ta­tion extend­ed by the­atre, to come into the dark and sit among friends who speak to you on what at least feels like an equal plane.

Mara, Foy, and Buck­ley espe­cial­ly shine among the cast, each giv­en the most tren­chant lines which their intox­i­cat­ing onscreen prowess dri­ves home. There are mis­steps, of course – a sub­plot about a trans*-coded char­ac­ter espe­cial­ly – but that is the nature of exper­i­ment. It must feel rough and raw so as not to cre­ate the impres­sion of con­clu­sion. As the film’s end­ing pow­er­ful­ly indi­cates, Women Talk­ing must not be the final word. Our dis­course must only car­ry on.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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