Peter Howell: Sarah Polley hopes ‘Women Talking’ is just the start of a conversation

In one of the many serendipitous moments that made her film “Women Talking” such a collaborative effort, Toronto writer/director Sarah Polley suddenly switched the pop song heard midway through it.

The change occurred late in the editing process for the critically acclaimed and Oscar-buzzed movie, which opens Friday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for an exclusive run. A wider release is planned for January, to capitalize on nominations for the Critics Choice Awards (six nods for picture, director, adapted screenplay, acting ensemble, supporting actress Jessie Buckley and score) and Golden Globes (two nods for screenplay and score).

The pop tune in question, heard on the truck loudspeaker of a 2010 census taker visiting the remote Mennonite community where the story takes place, was supposed to be the sad and yearning “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas. It’s the tune mentioned in the source novel by Canadian writer Miriam Toews.

That’s how it was until Polley came into the editing suite one day and her editor, Chris Donaldson, suggested they switch the song to one he loved, the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer,” an upbeat and hopeful number. He’d already inserted it into the film, abruptly changing the mood.

“Chris said, ‘Don’t be mad at me. I just want you to look at this; you can throw it out,’” Polley recalled with a laugh during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where “Women Talking” had its international premiere.

“I loved it — and then I wasn’t sure if I should love it. We were so attached to ‘California Dreamin’.’ But ‘Daydream Believer’ gave it a kind of lightness and a happiness and a weirdness that hadn’t worked with ‘California Dreamin’.’”

Adding lightness and happiness may seem at odds with the story, based on real events earlier this century in Bolivia, about female members of a strictly patriarchal religion discussing how to respond to years of nocturnal abuse. For years, they’ve been drugged and raped by male members of their isolated farming community; the attacks were initially blamed on ghosts, demons or “wild female imagination.”

Meeting secretly in a hayloft — the women include characters played by Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Buckley and Canada’s Sheila McCarthy — they debate whether to stay and fight the men, who are currently away facing legal proceedings, or simply leave with their children. Since the women are illiterate (their sect forbids female education) their discussions are written down by the one man they feel they can trust, a quiet schoolteacher named August, played by Ben Whishaw.

The women express all kinds of opinions about their situation, ranging from an understandable desire for violent payback to the perhaps astonishing suggestion that they might learn to forgive their attackers and even to love them.

“Women Talking” takes an uncommonly nuanced approach to the current #MeToo reckoning of male violence toward women. For her long-awaited fourth feature (her most recent was the family secrets doc “Stories We Tell” a decade ago), Polley decided she wasn’t interested in easy answers or the simplistic binary of good women/bad men.

“One of the really radical acts of the book that I love so much, what Miriam did, is that the only man you get to know in the book is a really good man, August,” Polley said, speaking just before leaving a downtown hotel to be whisked to the Princess of Wales Theatre for her film’s second TIFF screening.

“There’s this kind of running theme through the book and through the film, I hope: let’s talk not just about what’s not working, and what we want to destroy and what’s terrible, but let’s talk about what we would like to see and what we want to build. And I think August is an example of that. It’s wonderful to have him in the centre of the movie, this shining example of someone who is really trying to help and trying to listen.”

Few who have followed Polley’s career arc from child actor to director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter (for her debut 2006 feature “Away From Her”) would describe this big-hearted mother of three young children as negative, self-centred or unduly gloomy about the world.

She has always tried to make things better, which includes time spent as an anti-poverty activist in her 20s. She long ago tired of Hollywood glitz; she’s dressed for comfort on this particular day in a loose-fitting grey blazer and blue bell-bottoms, over a T-shirt and running shoes.

Yet, at the age of 43, Polley considers herself to be a recovering cynic.

“I’m an optimist, but I wasn’t always. I’ve outgrown my cynicism. And so I believe in people’s capacity to change. I really believe in people’s capacity to change their minds and shift, and to learn and unlearn …

“I’ve seen people who I’ve written off take responsibility and be accountable, and move in a very real and authentic way, and choose a different course.”

She understands that “Women Talking” will get people once again talking about #MeToo and the public shaming known as cancel culture. But she hopes her film will help expand the debate and contribute toward positive change.

The actor turned filmmaker attributes her current equanimity to a long period of soul searching, which culminated with the publication earlier this year of her essay collection “Run Towards the Danger,” in which she revealed dark aspects of her past, including a bad date at age 16 with Jian Ghomeshi, the disgraced former CBC star who has successfully fought charges of violence against women.

Polley also revealed in interviews that she’s been out of the public eye in recent times partly because she was recovering from a serious concussion that left her with many episodes of mental fatigue. So much so, she had to bow out of writing and possibly also directing the latest film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women,” an assignment that ultimately went to Greta Gerwig.

Making another movie wasn’t Polley’s immediate plan — she’s actually in the midst of writing her first novel — but then she read “Women Talking” and “loved it so much.”

She found out that the film rights to Toews’ book were held in part by actor/producer Frances McDormand, with whom she shares a manager, Frank Frattaroli. On the same day Polley emailed Frattaroli to ask about the film rights, McDormand emailed Frattaroli to see if Polley was available to direct.

It seemed like their partnership was meant to happen, so it did. McDormand even agreed to play a cameo role as one of the Mennonite women, part of a breakaway group who vote not to challenge the patriarchy.

“It just raised so many questions about so many things for me that were important, both inside and completely outside the realm of the #MeToo movement,” Polley says of “Women Talking.”

“The fact that the #MeToo movement had just happened obviously gave the book more momentum. But I think that it addresses so many things, both within that conversation and outside of it.”

Sarah Polley’s film gives a much-needed push to that conversation.

Star contributor Peter Howell is a movie critic based in Toronto. Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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