Women Talking (2022): A Thought Is a Dangerous Thing
Sarah Polley’s first directorial feature in 10 years is a bold contemplation on the dangers of thought, solidarity, and female autonomy.
Green fields, wooden barns, cotton sheets, puffed sleeve dresses, horse-drawn carriages. The film opens to what appears to be a point in history — a world that immediately reads late 19th or early 20th century, filled with textures, sights, and sounds unfamiliar to 21st century eyes. But when the diegetic incorporation of pop song Daydream Believer by The Monkees elicits no amount of surprise in the characters, the illusion comes to a screeching halt. The historical setting melts away to reveal a completely modern pickup truck, equipped with working megaphone, announcing the arrival of the 2010 census. The fog clears: the ballpoint pens, the ticking clocks, the crushed antibiotics. The stories of this town and these women are far from being relics of fantasy or the past.
“This story ends before you were born.”
In an isolated religious colony in rural North America, women and girls — from children to their own grandmothers — wake in their beds with bruises on their bodies and blood on their sheets. Gaslighting, abuse, and rape, performed by drugging them senseless with cow tranquilizer, are methodical occurrences blamed on anyone but the fathers, brothers, uncles, friends, and cousins responsible. If they speak up, they will be expelled from the community and barred from the Gates of Heaven — or so they have been taught. Forced pregnancies and trauma, pain, grief, and rage are suffered in silence. While the horrifying acts themselves are deliberately not pictured, their aftermaths are viscerally felt.
“I saw him.”
But one day, two girls catch one of the rapists. The man is arrested. He blurts out more names. The men of the colony, in support of the convicted attackers, leave to arrange for bail. The women are alone, faced with the unavoidable truth that no one is safe. Remaining silent and doing nothing is no longer an option. Though kept illiterate and unaware of any world outside their own, the women understand the concepts of democracy, equality, and justice better than anyone else. Two leading families are elected to decide if the fate of the community lies in fighting violence with violence or leaving their village and starting anew. They have two days before the men return, given an ultimatum of 48 hours to forgive the rapists or else. They gather in the hayloft of a barn and begin to talk.
For her first feature in 10 years, Canadian writer-director Sarah Polley chooses to adapt Miriam Toews’ powerful 2018 novel, a reimagination of true atrocities that occurred to women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia. After years of living in a state of involuntary obscurity, the women are finally able to put a name and a face to the trauma that has been inflicted upon them. Each of them respond differently, driven by different conflicts, desires, and motivations that often lead to heated confrontations, easily quelled with earnest apologies. No battle can be fought if one side chooses to step down first.
The clashing forces are Salome (played by Claire Foy), out for blood to avenge the women and protect her daughters, Mariche (Jessie Buckley), contemptuous to distract from the abuse she has internalized from her own husband, and Ona (Rooney Mara), who carries her rapist’s child yet harbors an inexhaustible love for the world. Each of their responses, no matter how confrontational or evasive, are entirely valid. Their arguments, though in stark opposition, are given equal attention under the spotlight — a principle that Polley treated with the utmost importance to ensure that not a single voice would get lost or muddied. Even if audiences are unable to agree with their opinions, they can still understand and sympathize with each character’s vantage point because, ultimately, they all want the same thing.
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An unexpected addition to their company brings an interesting dynamic to the women’s conversation. August (Ben Whishaw), a gentle male schoolteacher, is entrusted to take the minutes for their meeting. Though illiterate, the women wish to leave behind a trace of their gathering, evidence that someone once dared to think, speak, and act on the previously unimaginable. August is welcomed into their ranks but his duty is clear: he is only to transcribe — not edit — the women’s words, recording them just as they are. Attention is seldom drawn to him and he remains in the background, listening, understanding that it is not his place to interrupt the proceedings.
Interestingly, Toews’ novel is told from August’s point of view, positioned as an in for the reader as he explains the women’s situation and interprets their arguments. Polley throws all of that out the window. The role of the narrator is given instead to Autje (Kate Hallett), the then youngest member of the group who recounts the story to Ona’s unborn child. By re-centering the story on the women and cutting out the middleman, she restores their power to control their own narratives in a world where so much of their autonomy has already been taken away. August is relegated to the position of an active witness. He is far from a paragon of male behavior, though his willingness to learn and his continued supporting presence in the group demonstrates a vision of a possible future. “Collectively” is a word that resurfaces over and over, indicating solidarity amongst the women and their dreams of extending it to their male counterparts. After all, they cannot do this alone.
With a stellar script and cast lined up, Polley’s primary challenge lay with how to make a story about eight women of three generations talking in a room cinematic and immersive. She envisioned this film as an epic, accomplished by its minimalist yet stirring score, authentically sourced costumes, and expansive cinematography. Despite its exceedingly simple premise, there is not a single moment in the film where you forget what’s at stake.
Other than the ultra-widescreen aspect ratio, faded postcard-like color palette, and significant use of God’s eye view angles, director of photography Luc Montpellier and Polley honed in on using lighting to enhance an ominous sense of danger. “I had the light shift subtly throughout the entire film so that you had this subconscious feeling that the days were running out,” Montpellier explains about conjuring a subliminal ticking clock. The time that they have to formulate an escape plan disappears with the setting sun.
This danger is, undoubtedly, the men and their impending return to the colony. However, Polley also explores a separate manifestation of danger: thought. During the women’s winding conversations, they stop to ponder the cause of the attacks. While the women have been made victim to an atrocious culture, the men too fall victim to the same circumstances. Where they plead guilty is how receptive they have been to the things they are taught, the environment they live in, and their willingness to perpetuate a system of dominion and oppression. Therein lies the first danger of thought and its susceptibility to indoctrination. Can beliefs and behaviors so violent be undone? At what age is it too late for their own sons to sever their involvement in this system?
Hannah Arendt, political philosopher and German-Jewish Holocaust survivor, once proclaimed in her final book The Life of the Mind that, “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” For the women who live in a reality where assault is a culture and silence a virtue, the fact that they have dared to think in the opposite direction already puts their lives in jeopardy. Yet they know that it is a right they are entitled to hold and practice, and so they do. Thought leads to words, words lead to action. Without even realizing it, they have organized their first vote, constructed their first democracy, and initiated the first step towards systemic change. Without even realizing it, they have spearheaded a revolution.
Women Talking’s revolution is built upon discussion. With the bulk of the film centered around the debate, Polley conveys that the process of arriving at a decision is as significant as the decision itself. Between their pressing conversations is always room to take a break, to sing a child to sleep, to laugh and cry and pray and sing. While they are trying to devise a solution, they are also dismantling the social constructs that they have been taught and healing from the trauma they have endured — or as Polley describes, “ending a world and creating a new one.” Therefore, in a vacuum of gender-based violence and oppression, they deliberate fearlessly over the freedom to reinvent themselves, the possible forgiveness of their assailants, and the fate of the community. Following the film’s introduction, a sentence fades into view: “What follows is an act of female imagination.”
“All we have are our dreams.”
In the midst of their heavy discussions, the film frequently cuts away to shots of children, both boys and girls, running in the fields, braiding each other’s hair, leaping into haystacks, unaware of the terrors that plague the world they were born into. It is a constant reminder of who the women are fighting for. Their eventual decision is the first step towards a dream, a place at the brink of discovery where they and their children can think and act and live without fear.
Women Talking unreservedly reflects the circumstances of our world today, where women’s freedoms are still being violently denied and their autonomy still up for question. Polley’s film creates and dreams of an insulated society governed by love, where violence is met with pacifism and thus allows the existence of every definition of love — between parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, neighbors, and lovers. The quiet moments shared are a respite from the horrors of reality, and a reminder that love can still flourish even in the most hostile situations.
