[Women Talking is about the struggle to unearth language capable
of describing profound desires for freedom and safety.]
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SARAH POLLEY’S ACT OF IMAGINATION  
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Brianna Di Monda
August 3, 2023
Dissent
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_ Women Talking is about the struggle to unearth language capable of
describing profound desires for freedom and safety. _

Still from Women Talking , Universal Pictures

 

In Sarah Polley’s new film _Women Talking_, which won Best Adapted
Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, a group of women ranging
in age from their mid-teens to their seventies meet in a hayloft to
discuss whether or not to leave their Mennonite colony. For years the
girls and women have woken up bruised or bleeding, attacked in the
night by what they could only understand to be ghosts or Satan. For
years they have been led to believe that this was how God made them
suffer for their sins. Or that they were lying, or imagining these
attacks. Then they discover that several men in the colony have been
drugging and raping them with the aid of cow tranquilizer. Now, they
must decide if it is worth staying—or if, as mothers and wives and
daughters, they will prioritize their safety by abandoning the men of
the colony.

Though the women cannot read or write, one of them, Ona, asks the
colony’s schoolteacher, August, to take notes to serve as an
artifact for others to discover and learn what happened in the colony.
The women’s conversation proceeds as though they are in a courtroom.
They interrogate their options as August records the back-and-forth,
establishing a system that puts the attackers—even if not
present—on trial. Not content with their religious imperative to
forgive their assailants and move on, the women form a democratic
response to a long-hidden moral crisis. They do this knowing that to
leave their colony could mean forfeiting their place in the kingdom of
heaven.

Adapted from the novel
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Miriam Toews, the plot of _Women Talking _is loosely based on the
true story of the mass rape of girls and women in a Bolivian Mennonite
community between 2005 and 2009. Toews wrote the book after reading
about the case evoked her own Mennonite upbringing, which she escaped
at the age of eighteen. “I felt an obligation, a need, to write
about these women,” Toews told
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related to them. I could easily have been one of them.” Her book,
published in 2018, envisioned a subversive response the women could
have taken after learning the truth of these violations. Her
characters, who previously lived their days as submissive servants,
engaged in a secret dialogue on innocence, forgiveness, and desire.
August’s notes make up the majority of the book’s text, as though
readers hold in their hands the document left behind by the women. A
title credit to the film draws upon Toews’s foreword to proclaim,
“What follows is an act of female imagination.”

_Women Talking _is far from the only film to examine the cost of
sticking out a fraught domestic life. In a classic of the genre, John
Cassavetes’s 1974 film _A Woman Under the Influence_, Gena
Rowlands’s Mabel Longhetti is committed to a mental hospital by an
abusive husband. Subjected to shock therapy over a six-month stay, she
returns confused and terrified, her domestic strife with her husband
unresolved; in the final shot, the two make their bed together. The
characters in _Women Talking, _unlike Mabel, have each other to
validate their suspicions. Still, the great uncertainty of leaving the
protection of the colony leads some to fight for staying. At the
beginning of their discussion, Scarface Janz tells the others that
they cannot leave; they have everything they want in the colony.
Salome, whose three-year-old daughter has an STI after being raped,
scoffs. “Want less,” Scarface tells her. Mariche argues that to
leave would be to abandon security, safety, home, and family; later,
we learn that her husband was one of the men accused of raping the
women in the colony. As his wife, she’s endured his abuse for years.
It’s a risk for her, as it is for Mabel, to interrogate her
marriage.

Much of the discussion explores the distinction between what the women
want and to what they are entitled. Sitting on hay barrels and milk
buckets, they sort through the harm that has been inflicted upon them,
filing grievances they previously forgave for acts they vow not to let
happen again. They come to recognize that they must leave to avoid a
collision course with violence. When Mariche refuses to accept this
choice, Ona asks her how she could stay behind if she doesn’t even
have the strength to stand up to her husband. “Who are any of you to
pretend I have had a choice?” Mariche asks. As Mariche’s long-held
facade of anger falls, the women recognize that the fractured state of
the colony is their fault, too; they had expected their friend to
forgive her husband too many times when she should not have. This is
what they decide to call a “misuse of forgiveness.”

The Mennonite women, if they left, would stay within the tradition of
their community but leave behind their sons, brothers, and the only
land they’ve ever known. They’ve never even seen maps, of the
world or the surrounding area. The story of _Women Talking_, then, is
one where women decide to turn their backs on a system that has
betrayed them and fight to ensure their faith aligns more fully with
their values. One of the eldest women, Greta, advocates for their
leaving: “We have been preyed upon like animals. Maybe we should
respond like animals.” Salome asks if this would not be teaching
their daughters to flee from danger. “Leaving and fleeing are
different words,” another woman says. Indeed, their meanings say two
different things about the women: leaving gives the women the distance
to forgive their assailants on their own terms. It allows them to
escape the lonely and confused fate of Mabel, whose husband cannot
give her the help she so desperately needs. It permits them the safety
they and their children deserve. Yet the men of the colony could not
have manipulated their position for so long if the women had been
given language to talk about their bodies. They woke with bound hands,
bruises, and blood stains. They didn’t register these signs as marks
of rape. “Without language, there was a gaping silence,” the
narrator says. “And in that gaping silence was the real horror.”

A new focus on breaking the silence around sexual assault in recent
years has contributed to a reevaluation of a film canon long dominated
by men. In _Sight and Sound_’s latest critics’ poll of the
greatest films of all time, Chantal Akerman’s _Jeanne Dielman, 23,
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles_ took top billing. (Just a decade
earlier, it tied for thirty-fifth place.) Akerman’s
three-and-a-half-hour domestic epic, featuring little dialogue,
depicts a widowed woman who alternates between cooking, cleaning,
bathing, eating, and sex work until a small disruption that shifts her
schedule by an hour pushes her to a violent breaking point. The ending
should come as a shock, but the film’s careful editing and framing
help viewers understand why she came undone, even as she lacks the
language to describe her experience.

Akerman’s protagonist experiences a sudden rupture. Polley’s
women, by contrast, spend hours unearthing the language to describe
what freedom and safety would look like to them. Yet, just as with the
unexpected but sympathetic conclusion to _Jeanne Dielman_, even when
the Mennonite women make the decision to leave, it registers as the
natural next step. They were only women talking, but their
conversation nonetheless leads them to profound realizations about
their desires, proving that their exchange of stories and ideas was no
small thing. Viewers can imagine that leaving their colony allowed the
women to live more fully in accordance with the values of love,
compassion, and social justice that are central to the Mennonite
faith; that by claiming their independence, they created a more
vibrant and spiritually alive community in which all members
contribute and participate. Jeanne Dielman, by contrast, after
succumbing to her own dissatisfaction, sits in the dark at her dining
room table. She is not freed from her domestic life.

In the Bolivian case from which Toews’s book takes its inspiration,
the abusers were convicted in court and sent to prison. The colony
stayed intact, but similar assaults continued to take place. Though
the fictional Mennonite women choose to leave behind the men of their
colony, in real life, the change for a better life is not so swift or
simple. “Your story will be different from ours,” the narrator
tells us after a long shot of the women leaving has cut to black. For
many women who suffer abuse, very little changes with only a single
action. They may get glimpses of freedom when they give into what
drives them insane, as Mabel and Jeanne do when they respond to the
banality of life with unbridled screams and brash acts. Liberation
cannot always be achieved by simply walking away from communities that
have caused harm; sometimes, there is no path out. Mabel and Jeanne
are housewives with children. Where would they go, and who would they
be sacrificing?

At the end of _Women Talking_, the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”
plays as the credits roll, a celebration of the women’s
departure—and too neat an ending for viewers who just witnessed
their ongoing trauma. Wishing to leave with all her children, Salome,
out of a misplaced sense of maternal care, tranquilizes her adolescent
son when he resists coming with her. She then gathers weapons, knowing
the women may need to defend themselves later. She runs into August,
who offers her his gun and reveals that, rather than face the rest of
the men, he had planned to kill himself. The women’s departure does
not signal the end of violence or abuse. The credit’s upbeat song
serves as a macabre reminder of this fact. But for a moment, we are
offered the chance to believe the daydream that the Mennonite women
have put an end to their colony’s violence. Wild female imagination,
an accusation used at first to discredit the Mennonite women, is taken
up and wielded to conjure a dramatic means of liberation.

_BRIANNA DI MONDA is the managing editor of the Cleveland Review of
Books._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
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* movies
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* Women
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* Women's Oppression (11437)
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* Inequality
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* sexual assault
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* Violence
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* sexual abuse
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* Mennonite
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