I’ve learned to never say never with the Oscars, but let’s be real: Women Talking is not going to win best picture. Writer/director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel is too cerebral, too sedentary, too much of what it says it is – women talking in the aftermath of horrific sexual violence within their community – to win over enough Oscar voters. It made a meagre $5.6m (£4.67m) as a theatrical release. There doesn’t appear to be a campaign to secure best picture; the nomination was the win.
Women Talking is neither my favourite film that I’ve seen in the past year (that would be Aftersun) nor even the best film in terms of execution of unwieldy ambition (that would be Tár). But it is the one that I most admire, for its imagination of how cinema could respond to #MeToo, for experimenting with what a film inflected by the revelations and recriminations and lessons of the movement could be.
Almost all other #MeToo films to date have focused on literalism or exposure – an accounting of how famous bad men were brought down (She Said, Bombshell), the corrosive experience of adjacency (The Assistant), the ghosts of toxic masculinity (Men, Barbarian) or the caustic, righteous spiral of revenge (Promising Young Woman, a film whose pastel-hued bitterness I found more dead-ending than invigorating). Women Talking is the only one to look forward, to see promise in a cratered aftermath.
That aftermath is prodded, stretched and pushed in and around a hayloft within an insular, isolated Mennonite community. The past horrors are relayed in meticulously framed flashbacks, a wise combination of evidence and ellipsis – blood on sheets, bruises on inner thighs, a scream in the morning, the backs of a few perpetrators running off into the night. Enough to know this is a shared devastation, and that the call is coming from inside the community. (The film is based on a real series of rapes in Bolivia by at least eight men, of at least 150 women and girls rendered unconscious by the livestock equivalent of Rohypnol, from 2005 to 2009.)
For all the talking – the film provides at least one hair-raising, if at times too stage-y, monologue per character, and a murderer’s row of supporting performances from Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand – the women’s focus is predicated on action. There are three options to consider: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. Each has their own reason for leaning one way or the other, a few shades of the innumerable approaches to survival. Foy’s Salome, whose young daughter was raped, burns with fury; Buckley’s Mariche is resigned and bitter; Mara’s Ona, pregnant by one of her assailants, appears almost serenely philosophical. The questions are moral as well as bracingly practical. If you stay, how do you raise your sons so this never happens again? Do you bring any men with you? Do you fight for your family or abandon it? Is forgiveness permission? Has it been?
Polley renders these questions as urgent, but also fruitful. The hayloft scenes play as surprisingly visceral parable – these women, denied an education, cannot read or write (a male teacher, played by Ben Wishaw, records notes) but they can recognise a community-wide scourge, and collectively work to do something about it.
Not all of the aesthetic choices pay off, most notably Polley’s decision to desaturate the palette to a flat bluish-gray, which has the effect of making an already distant community feel even farther away. But it is refreshing to see a movie envision a response beyond searing rage or cynicism, to reinvigorate thorny, non-linear questions of healing and justice that have felt deadened by tabloid fodder, long court cases, backlash and burnout. Women Talking will not win the Oscar, but I would like to imagine a world where it would.
• This article was amended on 3 March 2023 because an earlier version referred to the film taking place in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. To clarify: the film was suggested by real events in Bolivia but the film version does not specify a location.
