‘They talk’: a hopeful portrait of a cruel reality

It has been many years since writer-director Sarah Polley launched a feature-length fiction film. Her feature debut, ‘Far from Her’, was nominated for best adapted screenplay at the 2007 Oscars and is now ‘Ellas hablan’, the adaptation of the novel by Miriam Toews, which she secured the only gap for a woman in the categories for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay in the nominations for the Oscars 2023.

It’s 2010 in a Mennonite community cut off from the world. For years, women and girls have been drugged and raped by the men of the congregation: they are their neighbors, uncles, brothers, cousins ​​and fathers. They wake up lethargic and bruised, or in some cases pregnant, but when they voice their concerns they are told it was the product of Satan, or God, or some “female act of imagination”. When it is revealed that they were indeed the men, they are all sent to prison, but are soon back on bail. The women have less than two days to decide what they will do before they return. Eight women from three different generations come together to make a decision on behalf of all: they can stay, fight, whatever that means, or walk away (not run away)..

Of very different opinions, Women are united by one thing: their faith, with which they want to be reconciled when they feel abandoned and forced to take their future into their own hands.. Some support forgiveness and silence, as always encouraged by Christian faith and pacifism, while others intend to do whatever it takes to protect their daughters, willing to respond to violence with violence. Those who stay consider it best to leave, leaving their home forever, fearing God will not find them if they leave. They confront their situation with the only thing they know, which for some is nothing more than what their pets, those animals, have taught them. “who are safer in their homes” of themselves.

A current debate

‘Ellas hablan’ exudes timelessness. From his courageous commitment to the direction of photography, between veiled and overexposed, which makes the story seem like a fragment frozen in time, a barely revealed analogue, as per the custom of the community that follows, which in its isolation and modesty simulates a period portrait . However, the conflicts he reveals are still valid in our society. The trilemma women face in the religious community is essentially the same as any abused woman: stay, fight, or leave.. Additionally, women face the oppressive structure of religious orders and the gaslighting of victims (“It’s Worse They Don’t Believe You”).

Polley, based on Toews’ novel, advocates progress that liberates women, but which will also liberate men: aren’t we all victims of patriarchy? However, he manages not to fall into the “poor thing, they don’t know what they’re doing” and dares to ask the most difficult questions about true forgiveness and the origin of aggression, which is not a person’s gender, but their position in can. Likewise, it addresses the most basic and complex question of all: why do we fight and what does it mean to win? However, while the debate transcends time, the arguments don’t really seem to have germinated in 2010 (feminism has changed a lot in the last decade), much less in an illiterate sector of an isolated community. While women don’t know feminism by name, what they are looking for in the name of peace and freedom, the story makes it clear that the screenwriter knows it, with a script where there is no shortage of conventions, too beautiful and with too modern judgments.

Instead, what it loses in the plausibility of the setting it gains in its way of telling it. There is a general problem in films dealing with violence, especially that perpetrated on women: the vision of the camera tends towards voyeurism and a sadism which delights at the same time with the aggressor’s gaze, the male gaze more harmful. This occurs in the rape scenes that look like pornographic films or in the Hellenistic portraits of the victims, who can’t help but wonder if the visual storytelling doesn’t contradict the message of the script. In ‘Ellas hablan’, Polley tries: just as Pilar Palomero detached ‘La maternal’ from any possible morbidity, the Canadian director and screenwriter has clear ideas about the story she wants to tell. He is not interested in showing violations or beatings, but their consequences: for this he shows the blood, the bruises and the wounds and lets the rest of the work be built by the eight tremendous actresses under his direction. And boy do they.

A flyer

Sarah Polley chooses actresses Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, four emblems of the creation of complex female characters, to lead the cast, accompanied by Sheila McCarthy, Judith Ivey, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett and Liv McNeil in an excellent casting choice. Standing out among them all is Claire Foy’s Salome, with its rants and feuds, as well as the impressive film debut of the young Kate Hallett, who is sure to be talked about in the future. She also emphasizes the character of August, the only adult man left in the colony, in charge of drafting the minutes of the meeting. Still, Polley has clear ideas about the story he wants to tell and who should tell itthus dethroning him from the role of narrator he exercises in the novel and allowing Ben Whishaw to show the essential counterweight of a man who radiates vulnerability and love, aware of the responsibility he bears.

In addition to the large choice in the main cast, Polley makes two big bets when it comes to promoting visibility and inclusion: He hires Shayla Brown, a young visually impaired actress, to play a character with the same characteristics and a true trans performer, like August Winter, to make Melvin. However, the latter is not given the necessary space to develop what could have been the most beautiful character in the film, but his story is rushed and he is exempt from the contradiction with which the rest of the characters are endowed, escaping thanks to the coherence of his acts of appearing to be a forced and archetypal inclusion of a trans character in the Mennonite community.

Although Sarah Polley tries to balance costume comedy and heartbreaking drama, the hints of laughter, sometimes ideal and sometimes embedded, accumulate at the beginning and leave the last half hour, making the end sleepy, where the most dramatic moments accumulate , which they leave behind, but always from hope. Because if there’s anything truly innovative about a feminist story today, it’s its positivist approach.and “Ellas hablan” claims that it is precisely this “act of female imagination” that allows us to take a leap of faith in the possibility of a better future, even if it is difficult to imagine.

Note: 7

The best: Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and a debate where all angles of feminism and patriarchy are brought up and discussed.

Worse: The Implausibility of Dialectic in a Community of Isolated and Illiterate Women.