Thursday, March 28, 2024

Sarah Polley – A Writer’s Voice, a Director’s Vision

Sarah Polley – A Writer’s Voice, a Director’s Vision

Sarah Polley has known she was a writer at heart for most of her life, and though she came up through the ranks in the industry as an actress, her destiny was to maintain more control behind the camera as a director. On a practical level, the solitary pursuit of writing can come much more easily than the larger dream of building the support and backing to become a director, but she always felt a fire burning that propelled her to a position where she could fully express the stories she saw in her mind’s eye. It’s the ambition of countless screenwriters but few are able to navigate the creative leap to make their hopes come to fruition, to learn how to make movies. Polley did it.

She started small, directing shorts, then polished her skills with sensitive, well-received feature films like Away from Her (also earning her first Oscar nomination for Adapted Screenplay) and Take this Waltz. She rose to prominence for many with her documentary about revelations within her own family, Stories We Tell.  Women Talking is the first large canvas film from Polley, produced by powerhouse collaborators, Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand. Polley was hand-picked by the producing duo to take on this difficult and unique subject matter, and with Polley at the helm, a brilliant, multi-generational SAG Awards-nominated ensemble followed, headlined by Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Ben Whishaw.

 

Women Talking taps directly into the dreadful intersection where deeply personal trauma is met with denial, questions or doubt.   It shows how power can be forged whenever women seek solace and healing by opening up to one another about repressed stories of abuse.

 

By encouraging debate and sensitive discussion of diverse viewpoints, women can together find the strength to overcome the devastation of their shared experience. The issue of rape within insular communities is a serious and complex issue with ramifications that obviously apply anywhere in the world. Stories like these chart a clear course for community concern to ensure that victims are supported and that abusers are held accountable for their actions.

Polley adapted her incisive screenplay from the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews — which in turn was loosely based on real-life crimes that took place between 2005 and 2009 in Manitoba County, an insular Mennonite colony in Bolivia that was established in the late 19th century by Mennonite refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe. The colony has its own government, schools, and legal system, which is based on traditional Mennonite values and beliefs. Reports of sexual  violence emerged from within the colony, particularly against women and children. Victims were discouraged to report that their cases were not taken seriously by the colony’s leaders or legal system, and that their abusers were not held accountable for their actions.

In the film, Polley’s camera is trained on the women.  She intentionally eschews showing the violence — nothing but disturbing traces of these rapes are explicitly conveyed, which make the psychological fragments salvaged from the frightening recollections of the victims all the more damaging. As the women struggle to make sense of their injuries, as these vague memories begin to come together into a cohesive explanation, the reality is worse than the nightmares. The women of the colony have a choice to stay or to leave. Stay and do nothing; Stay and confront the men, and maybe be beaten up and silenced anyway; or leave to try to find a better and safer future for themselves and their children.

The stories are shared and the options weighed in a series of secretive meetings in the loft of a barn. The scene is thus set for several astonishing dialogues to take place between a dozen of the more vocal women, and each interchange is brilliantly staged by Polley. It’s an ideal way to give their words maximum weight. Their apprehensive debate is not just the only logical scenario in which these tense events can unfold, it provides a tight dramatic structure essential to the entire narrative premise.

Above all, it serves as a fertile creative showcase for the wisdom, the wit, the moral self-assurance, and forthright independence of women who gradually realize that their only need for a man is for him to sit to one side and take notes. It’s a microcosm of women that have been taken for granted and abused for so long by so many men that their only recourse is to do whatever they need to do to prove to themselves that their dependency on those men is a myth – a myth that needs to be dispelled, dismantled, and rebuilt anew.

Polley’s vision of the film is different from the book and the result is a film that only she could have made. It has the same dream-like quality as Away from Her and Stories We Tell in that we are never really sure where we are in time. We don’t really know the year, save for clues quickly dropped and then hidden again. We don’t know much about the lives these women have led. We are invited in as passive observers to watch their conversations with each other that ultimately motivate them toward their only course of action available for them to survive.

In Women Talking, Polley focuses more on finding the tension between the actors as they began to spill the secrets they’d been hiding from each other and from themselves. She is particularly good at positioning the camera on the actor’s face just as the clouds pass, literally and figuratively. She is acutely aware of the way our emotions can sometimes change in the middle of a sentence, as layers of meaning in words spontaneously spoken can dawn upon the speaker.

Polley is also unafraid to release the escalating tension with fiery scenes and explosive anger that might be jarring in the hands of a filmmaker in possession of less confidence and tonal mastery. Throughout their own daily rituals of self-preservation, the one mood and attitude these women would have had to keep repressed was their anger. Polley takes great care to make sure the audience experiences the same sensation of emotional freedom, to convey just how good it feels for these women to finally have the chance to let their outrage burst forth, discovering the path to autonomy and self-determination that their own words have mapped out for them to follow.

Polley comes from a background in acting, so her work with this ensemble is meticulous and expansive. There isn’t a weak performance in the bunch. It is a film written by a woman, starring women and one that pays homage to the support Polley received from other women directors who mentored her as she began making the leap from acting to writing to directing.

Kathryn Bigelow was just one of the female directors who mentored Sarah Polley on her path to directing. As Polley said at the Telluride Film Festival:

“What happened with that generation of female filmmakers is when they saw someone coming up who was beginning to show any interest, those women grabbed onto me and said, ’You’re doing it, and here’s how fierce you’re going to have to be about it!’ So there was mentorship, and I had those role models.”



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