Women Talking – Review

Photo credits: Elmer Canas, Unsplash

Contains spoilers; contains frequent mentions of sexual violence and brief discussion of suicide.

For a film about women talking, there are an awful lot of silences. Awful silences. Painful, pregnant silences. The women who do start to talk are the inhabitants of a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia who experienced systematised sexual attacks in the 2010s, as fictionalised in Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel. The attacks have reached a crisis, and the women are voting on whether to ‘stay and fight’, ‘leave’, or ‘forgive’. This catalyst for liberation nonetheless reveals the damage that silence has already done, allowing violence to continue and knitting trauma deeper into this multi-generational community. Midway through the film, the young narrator reveals in her voiceover that ‘we never talked about our bodies’. Nor do the women ever talk about the violence done to them. They are at so much risk, and it is so unspeakable.

Even from the understated opening, I quickly felt that there was something wrong beyond the already disturbing exposition, something that I couldn’t name at first. It’s that the narrator is a child, and shouldn’t know anything about sexual violence, let alone whether to speak about it. We later learn that this child is addressing her future grandchild – one of the many ways in which women talk outside of and across linear time, perhaps because they can scarcely talk within its confines. The silence is broken, gradually, by caring physical touch, explosive raucous laughter – ‘sometimes you laugh as much as you want to cry’ – the assurance of love, and fierce but often tacit motherhood. It is on looking her daughter in the eye that Mariche (Jessie Buckley), so accustomed to her routine dehumanisation, breaks down, in two sharp sobs that cut through the whole film.

It’s a film that a lot of people will probably choose not to see, because it’s so, so heavy. Even for those who don’t see it, however, it can still be worthwhile to consider some of the important things this complex film is trying to do. For reference and guidance, the allusions to violence are recurring, wide-ranging and specific, but they remain allusions, and the ‘attackers’ – the word used almost throughout – remain faceless.

Only three adult males are given any character, or allowed into the barn where the women conduct their discussions. First is the endearingly bashful teacher August (Ben Whishaw), in the role of the now easily parodied male ally, tentatively radical in living a masculinity of listening and solidarity. The boys he teaches are fatefully ‘excellent students’ of dominant, violent masculinity, which he struggles to persuade them to unlearn. Second is the trans-masc character Melvin (August Winter), who cares for the children and speaks only in mime to the adults around him for a time, specifically, it becomes clear, until they acknowledge his gender. The goodness that both embody comes through most of all in the third masculine presence, ‘our heavenly Father’. A film like this might be tempted to denigrate the Christian God as an apparition and instrument of patriarchy, but instead Sarah Polley’s direction hints at his benevolence, through the women’s songs and prayers and feet-washing. They debate what to do with the unforgivable, and how a good, omnipotent God could create so much wrong, but their task isn’t to solve the problem of evil. They know their god is good, and that the violence they’ve endured can’t be in good faith, at all.

There is very little other knowledge that the group of women, at the start, can access. As a collective, they seem to represent almost all conceivable forms of vulnerability: children, pregnant women, and elderly women, all unable to read and without formal education. Those who are not automatically exposed by their age or physical condition (non-pregnant, middle-aged women) experience particular trauma that shapes their entire experience: Salome (Claire Foy) cannot protect her child, and Mariche is the only one who is married to a violent man. The leap required for these women, individually and together, to even imaginatively get out from this world (let alone physically) requires something superhuman. The outside world is shut off by big barn doors and beyond them, open unmapped plains. It filters in through fragments, of coping mechanisms and medical essentials – a cigarette, false teeth, the antibiotics that Salome walks a day and a half to get for her child (for some devastatingly unnameable illness). There is nothing to tell what year it is, the only (false) clue in a song that plays from the radio of a truck driving by – the Monkees’ ‘Daydream Believer’ (1967) – and that returns as a both hopeful and eerie earworm later on. Nor is there virtually any colour, except for red. The ensemble cast are all white, a choice that seems intentional given the production team’s other quite clearly signposted attempts at representation, developing gender non-conforming and disabled characters, for instance. The women look as if they might all be related to one another, which they might well be; they have never experienced anything different.

The main critique of this otherwise well-received, and Oscar-nominated, film has been that it is ‘stagey’. It seems to me that these critics are missing the point. (Before you ask, the two Guardian reviewers and the New Yorker reviewer are all male, though this is obvious from their laments to the effect that the film’s ‘sole visible male’ doesn’t get a word in – this choice, for this film, completely boggles even my cynical mind.) One critic has complained that the film neglects to show the ‘practicalities’ of precisely how dozens of women would plan and implement the intricate details of a plan to leave. Aside from the fact that this would make for quite dull cinema, Women Talking is very intentionally and explicitly staged, introduced by the film’s only text banner. We are asked to suspend disbelief, and join in ‘an act of female imagination’ – a phrase originally used to dismiss the women’s accusations of violence, and now turned on its head as an invitation for us to take these women seriously.

Why, then, choose cinema? Greater permanence to the women’s voices, surely, to complement the precarity with which the film ends. Secondly, perhaps, because you could read the film as another #MeToo allegory, as some critics have keenly tagged it, and so a Hollywood production speaks truth directly to power. I think that it’s a mistake to so hurriedly ringfence Women Talking like this, though. Occasionally, the rhetoric of these illiterate, uneducated women slips with wavering plausibility into pop feminist theory – including, yes, trotting out the (hopefully) familiar rebuttal to ‘not all men’, that men are also the ‘victims’ of male ‘power’ (that is, the omnipresent, never-spoken patriarchy), shaped by ‘conditions’ that they can learn, but also ‘re-learn’. These references do just steer clear of jargon, however, and are sufficiently stripped back as to remind us that despite historical change and specificity, sexual violence, and the conditions that make it possible, have acquired a horrific universality.

Not to be reduced to a spotlight on a Hollywood conversation that will only ever be so radical, the scope of Women Talking is much more expansive, and I think this is why it works so well as a film rather than a play. Most of the action – the day-long discussion – takes place in a single barn, with the odd scene in the kitchen or on the porch of (but never inside) residential houses in the community. But throughout, the camera glances out to nature – children playing in pale green fields, lit in almost blinding white; the path where two horses ride, in the memory of their owner Greta (Sheila McCarthy), to freedom (perhaps a generation or two ago, before, we can speculate, some backlash or weakening of their authority prompted the male attackers’ ‘last gasp’ outbreak of violence). These glimpses foreshadow or rather light the way for the women’s final departure, by which point the outside world has acquired a genuinely otherworldly quality.

The barn where the women deliberate might crudely be labelled purgatory, or to borrow an even more apt biblical term, a limbo (choosing between three options: leave, stay and fight, or stay and forgive). There is a fourth, non-option that the film hints at in philosophical abstract. Despite a jump-scare prank where a child leaps out of the window into a bale of hay, and worse, past tragedies, suicide is mercifully not a live option for a Christian community. By the time the women elect to leave, the outside world may as well be heaven, almost promising the old American Dream. They need to be ‘Daydream Believers’; they need to have hope. The group of women regain a sense of dignity in their exodus because they are not so much moving away from something (although, of course, they really are) but moving towards – ‘what is good, what is honourable, what is commendable’, as they repeat in their prayers. If the light of the new weren’t clear enough for us, it is signposted by a sky full of stars and the map that August gives to his love interest, Ona (Rooney Mara) who, throughout her pregnancy, is luminous and unflappable in her conviction to be free. It is this goodness that also generates development in Salome’s character – she is determined to stay and fight, and take revenge, until she realises that in staying, she would make herself a ‘murderess’, and could never be saved. Although with deep anger and sadness at not being able to fight back, she chooses to free herself from that moral burden, and leaves with the company of her own volition.

The parting manifesto of Women Talking comes in the form of three rights: the women need to be able to ensure the safety of their children, to practise their faith, and to think. In their decision to leave, the women are not so much liberated because they will certainly secure these three things for ever (patriarchy can never guarantee this), as because they have resolved that that is what they need, and what they will abandon everything familiar to find. Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand) is the only one who stays. She claims they should forgive, and tries to prevent the women in her care from leaving. She tells them to ‘want less’ – implying also need less, do less, think less, talk less. The ending of Women Talking is a steadfast reminder that even at its bare necessities, life should be more than this.