Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022) (Patreon)

I should mention right away that I have not read the Miriam Toews novel on which Women Talking is based. (There are only so many hours in the day, and for better or worse I do not share Scott Renshaw's adaptation completism, admirable though it may be.) So I cannot speak to how well this material works in a literary form. But I will say this. The version of Women Talking that has ended up onscreen would come across much better as a stage play. Not only would this obviate the need to construct faux-evocative camera angles within what is essentially a single-location episode. I would argue that the inherent limitations of the theater -- that it will always be perceived by the viewer as less realistic, more stylized, than cinema -- would elevate the material significantly.

The mid-length monologues and protean feminist consciousness that functions so poorly in Polley's film would be somewhat relieved of the burden of verisimilitude were it mounted as a stage production. As I said on Twitter, there is nothing particularly wrong with Women Talking's conceit: a group of women in an insular, patriarchal Mennonite community responding to collective trauma by channeling the consciousness-raising sessions of Second Wave feminism. After all, the setting of Women Talking is an odd one, an enclave of conspicuously "outdated" practices and beliefs that exists in 2010. That's to say, an attentive artist who wasn't chained to notions of the Oscar season prestige picture might've have exploited this temporal / cultural discrepancy in a manner similar to Christian Petzold's semi-contemporary Nazi Germany in Transit.

Seen in this light, the most common criticisms of Women Talking would be at the very least mitigated, if not avoided completely. The fact that the Mennonite women don't seem to react to what would probably be their greatest fear (rebelling against the men leading to eternal damnation) might still be an issue. But if it were raised more philosophically as an issue, we might be able to witness something along the lines of feminist (or at least anti-misogynist) awareness emerging organically from the disconnect between the tenets of Christianity and the men's barbaric behavior. After all, even these illiterate women who could never read the Bible themselves do have a reasonably firm grasp on what Christianity is and what it is not. 

And given the fact that the rapists have clearly violated their compact with God, leaving the colony and starting over could emerge as the best option for saving their souls. The men have essentially salted the earth. And this is the rupture that should be driving Women Talking: that by their actions the men, God's appointed surrogates, have spat in the face of Christ. We should be watching the women grapple for a vocabulary to describe their oppression, something that has been systematically denied them. That might have resulted in a gratifyingly Gramscian film (or play).