Sarah Polley writes arguments that stay interesting because the people having them matter. We recommend her films for their talk, with a reservation: she can keep explaining what we have already understood.
Fi1m perspective
In Women Talking (2022), the schoolteacher sits at the edge of a hayloft, taking minutes while the women decide whether to stay or leave their colony. Polley keeps the practical questions tangled with the religious ones: what happens to the boys, and what does forgiveness mean if it is demanded? The women interrupt each other, so an exchange that could become a lecture keeps changing direction. Polley is good at giving each speaker a reason to resist what the others are proposing.
Her first feature as writer-director, Away from Her (2006), adapted a story by Alice Munro; Take This Waltz (2011) followed with an original screenplay. With the documentary Stories We Tell (2012), she turned to her own family’s conflicting accounts of the past. She returned to literary adaptation with the miniseries Alias Grace (2017), from Margaret Atwood’s novel, and Women Talking, from Miriam Toews.
In Stories We Tell, Mike Munn cuts the interviews so that one person can finish a memory begun by someone else and disagree with it in the process. Iris Ng shoots them plainly in daylight, keeping our attention on faces rather than decoration. We were moved by Michael Polley in the recording booth, calmly accepting his daughter’s request to read a passage again without appealing for sympathy. Jonathan Goldsmith’s mostly piano score is restrained enough to let the speakers hold our attention. The frustration is that Polley keeps explaining how stories are shaped after the interviews have already shown us.
Women Talking has a different problem: the dialogue is persuasive, but Luc Montpellier’s drained colour makes the images needlessly dreary. Claire Foy gives Salome’s anger an urgency that keeps the theological discussion from becoming too comfortable, while Jessie Buckley makes Mariche’s resistance sharp and difficult. Editors Christopher Donaldson and Roslyn Kalloo keep finding a listener’s reaction across the circle, so we register the effect of a speech as well as its meaning. The brief glimpses outside the loft add little to what the women have already said. Start with Stories We Tell; if the arguments are what hold you, follow it with Women Talking.
Biography
Sarah Polley is a Canadian actor, writer and director. Born in Toronto, she began her career as a child actor, appearing in the television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996) and films including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997).
She later wrote and directed feature films including Away from Her (2006), Take This Waltz (2011) and the documentary Stories We Tell (2012). Polley wrote and directed Women Talking (2022), for which she received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
