They speak is a political allegory located in an abstract place and outside of real time, an archaic agricultural and religious community, but which is part of a very specific historical context, that of the Me Too movement, a tsunami of feminist sorority that has marked a before and after an after in impunity for sexual predators. Of course, not all men are rapists or slobbers, nor are all women victims. But beyond this cliché, unfortunately, very few have grown up oblivious to the terrifying stories of violence and abuse that we have read, heard and seen since we were little, and a lot, in the cinema.
The atrocities committed with our bodies have given infinite play on the screen. And that includes startling ellipses, like the rape of the girl from Landscape in the mist, masterpiece by Theo Angelopoulos, to the explicit taste for the most lurid and disgusting details of the infamous rape of Irreversible, by Gaspar Noe.
They speak is an openly militant film that plays with the power of off-screen (rape culture is in the collective consciousness and Sarah Polley rightly rules out filming it) to focus on the political symbolism of its proposal, an allegory that is born in the same start of the film, when the phrase “What follows is an act of female imagination” can be read on the screen. This exciting proclamation sets the bar very high, perhaps too high, for a film full of ramblings about justice and revenge, resistance, evil, love and even pacifism that are linked to the most combative tradition of political-documentary theater. .
The plot is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Canadian Miriam Toews, who was inspired by a true story that occurred between 2005 and 2009 in the Manitoba Mennonite colony, located in Bolivia. There, more than 150 women and girls, some as young as three years old, suffered continuous abuse from a series of men from their community who drugged them with animal anesthesia while they slept. The women woke up dizzy, covered in bruises, semen, and blood, while the rest of the men pointed to the afterlife, divine punishment, Satan, and even the fanciful minds of the victims. Until the truth fell by its own weight. Toews, who had also lived in a Mennonite community—will be remembered by many as the character of Esther in the fascinating silent lightby the Mexican Carlos Reygadas—, turned the trauma caused by those indigestible events into an imaginary conversation between the women of different generations of Manitoba.
Led by an attractive chorus of great actresses, some as well-known as Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, Polley avoids concrete facts to reproduce between the wooden rafters of a barn the clandestine discussion that arises between the victims and that obeys three impulses: do nothing and turn the page, stay and fight for justice to be done or leave, be excommunicated and wander aimlessly in search of a new life. The pros and cons, the points of view of the older ones versus the younger ones, center a film that underscores the power of sisterhood, but without delving too deeply into other underlying ideas.
Polley, the actress of, among others, My life without me and The secret Life of the wordsby Isabel Coixet, made her directorial debut in 2006 with away from her, adaptation of a story by her Canadian compatriot Alice Munro that already demonstrated the rigor in the gaze of a director with a style closely linked to the tradition of American independent cinema. In They speak —Oscar nominee for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay — Polley guides the viewer through the narrative voice of one of the youngest of the group of women. The intergenerational dialectical battle proposed by the film oscillates between the theatrical staging of the barn and a series of sensory postcards in which domestic spaces, girls’ braids and tilled fields make up the space for survival. The masculine presence is reduced to a gloomy abstraction, men are a threatening cloud that has its counterpoint in the only adult man who appears on the screen, the teacher of the sons, without the centrality of his figure (in Toews’ book he is the narrator) curdled at all. The film sometimes gets stuck in its underlining and although the angry silence of Frances McDormand’s character is overwhelming, more travel is needed for her repressed voice. Yet Sarah Polley is brave and dares to take sides, turning her final decision into a utopian force capable of healing collective trauma.
They speak
Address: Sarah Polley.
Performers: Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley.
Gender: drama. United States, 2022.
Duration: 104 minutes.
Premiere: February 17.
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