Talking About “Women Talking”

Let’s face it: a film called Women Talking sounds like a gabfest. It’s easy to imagine a screen full of bitchy wives, making catty comments over cocktails. It suggests an update of The Women, the 1939 George Cukor opus in which the ladies who lunch struggle to grab power as well as one another’s husbands.

 The title Women Talking turns out to be hugely accurate for the new film directed by Canadian auteur Sarah Polley  But this is hardly a frivolous exercise about soignée ladies vying for social power. Polley’s script adapts a 2018 novel which itself is based on what happened within an isolated Canadian Mennonite community that had settled in Bolivia. In Polley’s film, the location of the settlement is left obscure. But what’s crystal-clear is that these women, raised to live modest, conservative, devoutly religious lives, suddenly have no choice but to make a decision that may overthrow everything they believe.

 Watching the film, it’s easy at first to think that these women lived long ago. Their drab frocks and head coverings, along with their clean-scrubbed faces, suggest an era much earlier than our own. And the fact that they can neither read nor write strongly argues that this story unfolds, perhaps, back in the nineteenth century, when rural communities stuck to subsistence farming, and women, in particular, weren’t always granted opportunities for education. But a few passing references within the dialogue—to antibiotics, for instance—remind us that this tale unfolds in much more recent times. Amazingly, the actual story took place circa 2011.

 It's a story that’s sordid in the extreme. Though the adult males in this community are never seen, we learn that some among them are guilty of behavior that can only be called heinous. It has become their practice to drug the community’s girls and women with cattle anesthetic, then rape them in their beds. Inevitably, some of the women have become pregnant; most have suffered deep psychological distress. But though several of the culprits have been caught and jailed by local authorities, the community is in process of bailing them out, and requiring the defiled women—on religious grounds—to forgive.

 Under these dire circumstances, a small clutch of  women meet secretly in a hayloft to make a fateful decision: should they knuckle under to the rules set by their all-male elders? Should they stay put and fight the patriarchy? Or, gathering their small children, should they pack up and leave the only world that most of them have ever known?

 Polley, who was once a young actress known for challenging parts in films like The Sweet Hereafter, was talked into directing by Frances McDormand, who functioned as producer here while also playing a small but key role.  At age 43, and with three young children at home, Polley believed her directing career was on hold when McDormand approached her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Given her own domestic situation as well as the sensitivity of the subject matter with which she was dealing, Polley strove hard to make her set as accommodating as possible. Her cast was treated gently, as were the many child actors the story required. Key behind-the-scenes positions were filmed almost entirely by women, and the cast (including big names like Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, and Claire Foy) soon bonded into the tight-knit family group they were intended to be. Kudos to Ben Wishaw as the sole sympathetic male included within the cast.

 This somber film was not one I could love wholeheartedly, but my respect for it runs deeps.

 

 

 

 

"Carol": Bringing a Fantasy to Life

Though I admire Todd Haynes’ carefully modulated brand of filmmaking, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of his current film, Carol. Frankly, although I thought the two central characters in this Lesbian love story were absolutely beautiful to look at, I found myself not all that interested in their passion. Perhaps that shows the limitations of my own sexuality. Listening to a Fresh Air interview with Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (who has just been nominated for a Writers’ Guild award for her adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel), I realized that they are part of a world I have personally not entered.

Patricia Highsmith, as readers of her fiction are well aware, was best known for psychological thrillers marked by a homoerotic subtext. Her Strangers on a Train was adapted into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best works, and her Ripley novels have been filmed many times, notably in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role. Curiously, Highsmith was a gay woman who vastly preferred the company of men. But she had an experience as a young shop clerk that led directly into the writing of the pseudonymous novel The Price of Salt, from which Carol is adapted.

It seems Highsmith was working at Bloomingdale’s, trying to earn money to finance her sessions with a therapist. Suddenly she looked up and noticed a customer, whom she later described as “a Hitchcock blonde with a heart of ice.” Absolutely nothing happened. But she replicated the scene, in a sense, when writing The Price of Salt, turning herself into the innocent young woman (played by Rooney Mara in the film) who encounters the love of her life when the elegant Carol comes up to her department store sales counter to buy a Christmas gift.  

This fascinating anecdote comes from Phyllis Nagy, who met and befriended a much older Highsmith (by then a famous author) when she was a very young woman in a lowly position at the New York Times. The fact that Nagy is also gay might seem like the source of a natural bond between the two women. But the truth is slightly more complicated. Highsmith at that point in her life was known for aggressively chasing after younger women. One day, when she and Nagy were lunching, she pulled out an old-fashioned wallet and unfurled a series of plastic photo-sleeves. Each one contained a shot of a young woman in skimpy S&M style attire (Nagy compares these photos to Charlotte Rampling’s wardrobe in The Night Porter). Highsmith queried, “I don’t suppose? . . .”  But it was plain to both of them that Nagy was definitely not the type. They were, and remained, simply friends.

As a gay woman, Nagy was determined to get at the truth of love between females in her Carol screenplay. She didn’t want to show anyone wallowing in guilt; she did want to show real conversation between women in love. As a gay man, Todd Haynes respected her script and brought to it his own feelings about passion. For whatever reason, the connection between Carol and Therese just didn’t strike me as terribly interesting. (I did not feel the same way about the two male lovers in Brokeback Mountain. Maybe an analyst could explain why.)

At any rate, I love the story about Highsmith turning a very brief encounter into a fantasy, then making it a novel. Curiously, the same thing happened to a young man named Charles Webb. He saw a sexy older woman playing cards in his parents’ living room. Then he wrote The Graduate.