Susan Granger’s review of “Women Talking” (Orion/United Artists Releasing)
Best Picture Oscar-nominee “Women Talking” delves into how solidarity is the key to survival when sexual abuse, including raping four-year-old children, is not only acceptable but condoned through Mennonite religious practices.
“What follows is an act of female imagination,” reads the title card.
Set in 2010 on a remote farm in Canada, it revolves around a group of women inhabiting a closed, cultlike, Christian community in which men routinely drug helpless women/children with livestock tranquilizers and sexually assault them in the middle of the night.
When the women complain, they’re told that what they’ve experienced was demonic, a figment of “wild female imagination,” filling them with guilt and shame. That’s obviously happened once too often because, when some of the men are arrested, the rest go to a nearby town to post bail and rescue them from incarceration.
Secretly meeting in a hayloft, several women are deciding how to react to this latest atrocity. Because they cannot read nor write, they’ve asked the schoolteacher, August (Ben Whishaw), to transcribe the minutes of their meeting.
They realize that they have three choices: 1) Do nothing, 2) Stay and fight, or 3) Leave.
Pensive, pregnant Ona (Rooney Mara) yeans for an idealistic colony where women are educated and allowed to participate in community decisions. Ranting Salome (Claire Foy) oozes rage at patriarchal oppression, along with cynical Mariche (Jessie Buckley), while Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand) is a staunch advocate of “do nothing.”
Two elderly women, Mariche’s mother Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Ona’s mother Agata (Judith Ivey), offer sympathetic perspective, even as the teenagers (Liv McNeil, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett) are easily distracted – plus gender-nonconforming Melvin (August Winter).
Adroitly adapting Canadian author Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel which drew on real-life events that occurred in an insular Mennonite agrarian community in Bolivia, Oscar-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley has assembled an impressive ensemble cast.
Each has an explanatory monologue, emoting as if it was a staged drama, resulting in a film that is not inherently cinematic, particularly since cinematographer Luc Montpellier uses desaturated color.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Women Talking” is an uncompromising 7…only in theaters but soon to be on Amazon Prime.
