Women Talking

Even if Sarah Polley’s superlative work doesn’t get the plaudits or the audience it deserves, it should stand to have a far greater legacy. This is the kind of cinema that endures – not just as a great work of art (although it is that), but as something that moves us all forward.

What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.

Polley has taken a pointed, of-its-moment novel and turned it into an indictment and a plea for civil discourse in a call-to-arms moment.

Despite the specificity of the setting and the performances, there is a universality to the story.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

Polley attempts to tackle the issue from multiple angles – how male toxicity is passed down to helpless youth by their elders, for example – but ends up running in circles.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

There were so many women talking in this film. Tall women, short women, women big and small. Every so often, a man talks but then it quickly swaps back to women talking. 10/10 would watch women speaking to each other again.

The debate is a film you have to get involved with. Staged in a chamber play style and featuring an outstanding ensemble cast, the viewer gains insight into the desperate plight **** of women. The film completely dispenses with special effects or dramatic ups and downs. Apart from a debate that seems almost philosophical, nothing is shown. This creates an intense picture of different characters who deal with the exceptional situation very differently. The basic tenor is the question: to leave or to stay and fight? A question that many people (even today) have to ask themselves. However, the story is told in a somewhat one-dimensional way for my taste. The question "to stay and fight" is barely discussed. Rather, the discussion mainly revolves around whether one can justify leaving. The evil is a kind of artificial intelligence that has created its own system and embodies the male species. In my opinion, the film is too predictable and its exploration of the horror too one-sided.

Fully fleshed characters expertly acted and portrayed in an dire and impossible situation.

(Mauro Lanari) Feminist consciousness-raising group in a barn. In 2010 they are not fighting patriarchy but a masculinity that is more toxic than ever: slaves of narcotizers, rapists, aggressors who forbid them the right to vote and education. While in the West family law has admitted certain victimistic excesses and is rebalancing, Towes, Polley and McDormand (here also producer with Pitt) can either speak of the Canadian writer's personal experience or of the Taliban regime or of a colony bigots in Bolivia, instead they criminalize the entire male universe (August, the only actor in the feature length, is played by the gay Ben Whishaw). The movie is so biased that it makes the illiterate protagonists of the highest systems dialogue. More indisposing than provocative, it has been compared to "Dogville" (2003) where, on the contrary, Trier knew how to deal with much more universal issues than #metoo. Losing all sense of proportion, this cinema condemns itself to ridicule: at the end of 2022, the ten-year poll by "Sight and Sound" elected for the first time as the best film in history "Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels" (Chantal Akerman 1975), and there was no lack of harsh criticism.

Boring and pretentious nowadays politically correct propaganda. Don't waste your time and money.