Sarah Polley | The stories we tell

Jian Ghomeshi had just been accused by several women of sexual assault shortly before the #metoo movement gained momentum. Sarah Polley told her sister she was lucky the star CBC host didn’t strangle her too, when she went out one night with him.

” But he your strangled, isn’t it? “, replied his sister. Sarah Polley’s brother, who is a lawyer, also reminded her that this is what she had confided to them, twenty years earlier, in the middle of the night, after having fled, in shock, the apartment of Ghomeshi.

Jian Ghomeshi, singer of the group Moxy Früvous, was 28 years old. Sarah Polley, already a well-known actress, was only 16 years old. After recounting her short night at Ghomeshi’s to her sister and brother, she never spoke of it the same way again, to anyone. She only revealed for years the most trivial details of this missed date, to make her friends laugh at parties. So much so that she came to forget what had traumatized her…until her sister reminded her.

Understand the silence

Sarah Polley tells this story in her autobiographical book Running Towards the Danger – which will soon be available in French in Quebec – in order to remind us that it is illusory to require victims of sexual assault to remember in detail what they suffered during an interrogation in court .

She also tells it in order to make it clear why she was silent during the Ghomeshi affair. Because she often wrote to the presenter afterwards, because she willingly agreed to be interviewed by him, because she laughed or smiled at his inappropriate comments in public – so much so that we could believe that they were flirting – and that she even told him, in jest, that she would introduce him to her sister, whom he liked.

She was mostly silent because all her lawyer friends advised her not to add her voice to those of the other women implicated in the criminal case against Jian Ghomeshi. By reminding her that she would have more to lose than to gain, insofar as the importance which is due to them is not granted to the mechanisms of defense of the victims.

Repressing for years the fact that a man tried to strangle us without our consent during sex, then remembering it at the appropriate time, when a trial begins, can be perceived as improbable or incoherent, even as a lie before a court of law, as well as in public opinion.

“That pain of not being believed and not being able to fully believe yourself,” Polley writes of the concussion that kept her out of work for nearly four years. She was on the second draft of the film’s script Little Women, which she could not finish and which was taken over by Greta Gerwig. Many people around her couldn’t believe that a concussion could have handicapped her for so long.

Charge against the patriarchy

The pain of not being believed. Sarah Polley could have written the same thing about victims of sexual assault, I pointed out to her in a December interview. “There’s obviously a direct connection there that I haven’t made before,” she says.

She obviously made the link, on the other hand, between her partial amnesia after the trauma of her meeting with Jian Ghomeshi and her new film Women Talkinga brilliant adaptation of the novel of the same name by Canadian Miriam Toews, which is due to be released in Quebec on January 13.

This harsh and moving film features a dozen women who – along with their daughters – have been victims of rape and sexual violence in a Mennonite community. They meet to decide whether or not they should leave this community which asks them to forgive their attackers, on pain of being excommunicated.

“I started writing the book before the screenplay,” says Sarah Polley. Then I started writing the screenplay and came back to the book before finishing the screenplay. So there are bound to be places where there is a conversation between the book and the film. »

Women Talkingchosen among the ten films of 2022 by the prestigious National Board of Review in the United States and notably nominated for the Golden Globes for the screenplay of Polley, is the first feature film by the Canadian filmmaker – an Oscar nominee for best screenplay suitable for Away from Her in 2008 – since Take This Waltzin 2011.

A year later, in the documentary Stories We Tell, she told the story of her mother, who died when Sarah was only 11, and her affair with her biological father, Montreal producer Harry Gulkin. Since then, Sarah Polley has given birth to three daughters, sometimes in difficult conditions, and suffered a serious concussion.

Women Talking, a full-throttle charge against the patriarchy, inspired by real-life events, takes an empathetic look at different ways of responding to sexual assault. Some women in the community are scared, others are angry or want revenge, and still others want to move on. They do not all agree, vote and debate the consequences of their choices, and wonder if they will nevertheless be welcomed into the “kingdom of heaven”.

“It was important for me to be faithful to what Miriam had described so well in the novel,” explains the 44-year-old filmmaker. There are so many different reactions to this kind of trauma. They are all valid. I liked that there was no uniformity, but several degrees of reactions from these women who had gone through similar experiences, in the same community. »

Before making Women Talking, Sarah Polley did not know Miriam Toews, who herself grew up in a Mennonite community. But she admired his work. “I had just read the novel when I found out that Frances [McDormand] and Dede Gardner [les productrices du film] had acquired the rights to adapt it. I contacted them immediately to see if they had someone in mind to script and direct the film, and they got back to me within a day. »

Sarah Polley drew from the novel a tense camera, with a theatrical touch Twelve angry men by Sidney Lumet, which is reminiscent of both the white ribbon by Michael Haneke and The Scarlet Maid by Margaret Atwood.

One can only be revolted by the profound injustice that these women suffer as well as by the state of slavery and ignorance in which they are kept.

“They’re trying to figure out how they can undo a universe that’s caused them so much pain, and create a new one that doesn’t inherently have the insidious structures that will allow that pain to continue,” the screenwriter believes. and director.

” Augmented reality ”

What is special when we discover Women Talking, is that we have the feeling that the story takes place at the beginning of the last century, while it is set in 2010. This impression is reinforced by its desaturated colors, bordering on monochrome, which may put some people off . “At first we have the impression of observing a universe that is very distant from us, then we realize that it is closer than we think”, says Sarah Polley, who perceives her film as a postcard washed out of a world that no longer exists.

“It was important that there be a part of fable in this story, so that we could absorb everything. It is an archetypal story. Everything is a bit exaggerated. It’s augmented reality. If the film had been shot realistically, everything would have fallen apart. With a realistic color palette, one might wonder about how the characters speak, where the barn they meet, or what’s less believable in this scenario. »

I ask her if she has considered taking on a role in this choral film noted for its extraordinary cast (Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand, etc.). Does the actressExotica and The Sweet Hereafter, of his friend Atom Egoyan, sometimes has the desire to reconnect with his career as an interpreter? To shoot another film with Isabel Coixet, for example, after My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words ?

“It’s funny you say that because we wrote to each other yesterday for the first time in years!” I’m not completely against the idea of ​​acting in a film again, but I have no ambition to do so either. »

In her book, Sarah Polley describes the performance anxiety the stage gave her and the weight of stardom when she was a child actress on the TV series. Road to Avonlea. She also talks about the trauma of the almost catastrophic filming of Adventures of Baron Münchhausen by Terry Gilliam.

She thanks her agents for having remained faithful to her, despite all the opportunities she was able to sabotage afterwards, at the last moment (the famous role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous of Cameron Crowe which was intended for him, for example), for lack of ambition or a desire to put his physical and mental health before the rest.

“If I’m offered an incredible role, I’ll probably take it,” says Sarah Polley, who has been a progressive activist since adolescence. But I’m in no rush to do it and I hate that you don’t control anything in your life when you’re an actress in a film.

If she agreed to shoot Women Talking, in southern Ontario, it is precisely because she knew that she could reconcile her professional and family life. “I wouldn’t have made this film if I hadn’t been promised shorter working days, so that I could see my children every day,” she says. It was an essential condition for me to be able to make another film. »

Fortunately for us that this condition sine qua non has been filled. Women Talking is the most accomplished work of Sarah Polley’s career. “I hope the film will spark a conversation,” she says. She can count on it.

Women Talking will be in theaters on January 13.