By Sandra Hall
Women Talking ★★★★
(M) 104 minutes
There’s a dreamy quality to Sarah Polley’s Oscar contender Women Talking, although its plot is rooted in harsh reality. Polley adapted it from Miriam Toews’ best-selling novel, which was inspired by a series of sexual assaults that occurred in an isolated Mennonite colony between 2005 and 2009.
Toews has described the novel as “an imagined response” to the way in which the sect chooses to deal with these attacks. The perpetrators turn out to be young men from within the settlement and the story begins as the rest of the colony’s men leave for the nearby town to bail them out of jail.
Emily Mitchell (left), Claire Foy and Rooney Mara in Women Talking.
While they are away, the women get together to decide on their course of action. First, they take a vote – whether to obey their men and forgive their attackers, leave the colony en masse, or stay and protest against the men’s conduct of the case. When their count delivers a tied vote between leaving and staying to fight, the female members of two families are delegated to reach a final decision.
The book was optioned by Frances McDormand, who plays a minor role as an immovable supporter of the colony’s old ways. She won’t support a mutiny, whatever shape it takes. She’s at the families’ meeting only to snipe from the sidelines.
The main battlelines are drawn by Salome (The Crown’s Claire Foy), a mother enraged by an attack on her young daughter, and Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who has been storing up years of resentment at the abuse she and her children have endured at the hands of her brutish husband. She’s always been urged to forgive him, so why should she rally to the rebels’ call now?
Ben Whishaw, from left, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy in Women Talking, which is adapted from Miriam Toews’ best-selling book of the same name.
The book’s narrator is August (Ben Whishaw), the colony’s over-sensitive schoolteacher, considered a curiosity by the other men. The women, who are not permitted to read or write, have asked him to take notes, and his voice is infused with a bone-dry, self-deprecating humour of the eternal outsider.
Polley, however, has chosen another point of view. In the film, the tale is told by Outje (Kate Hallett), a spirited 16-year-old. She’s addressing her account to the unborn child of Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant from one of the attacks. As a result, the irony is underplayed in favour of the portentous tone of a Biblical parable in which the absent men take on the fearful aspect of a single homogeneous force.
The film is shot in tones so muted that much of it looks to be in black and white, and the cavernous barn where the meeting takes place looks down on the fields, paths and cabins that make up the women’s world. Never mind their illiteracy; their ignorance of geography means they have no idea where in the world they are.
If you can go along with these broad brushstrokes and consequent holes in the plot, you’ll find high drama in Foy and Buckley’s ferociously fine performances, together with moments of wistful poetry in the women’s determination to find a solution that will help to heal and honour every one of them.
Women Talking is released in cinemas on February 16.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.