The last time I was this pissed off watching the Oscars was in 2004.
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Denys Arcand won the Oscar for best foreign film for Les Invasions Barbares, a masterpiece that today takes on the air of a premonitory documentary.
This time, I invoked the stars for a Canadian filmmaker, Sarah Polley, and her film Women Talking.
Hollywood being Hollywood, she was never going to win the Best Picture Oscar. But she won the one within her reach, that of the best adapted screenplay, for the novel of the same name by author Miriam Toews.
Many have described Women Talking as a feminist film, in line with the #MeeToo movement. I saw in it a masterful ode to the duty of being a mother. Sarah Polley made it a work about the survival of democracy.
This is how it is with great films, they have several levels.
Mother
Women Talking tells the story of a revolt, those of women, mothers, who, prisoners of a Mennonite community, are fed up with seeing their daughters raped with impunity.
Stay, leave, fight, that is their dilemma.
It is the cry from the heart of mothers against the violence that their daughters suffer.
It is the cry from the heart of women who yearn for their children to be freed from the dictates of God’s will.
Above all, it is the courage of mothers ready to sacrifice everything to save the future of their children.
It is already a lot. But you had to hear Sarah Polley receive her Oscar.
Democracy
Because Sarah Polley did not launch into a feminist diatribe.
Rather, she described her film as “a radical act of democracy where people who don’t agree on everything manage to sit in a room together and agree on what to do next without violence.” They do it, not just by talking, but by listening. »
If only, sometimes, the political class took such a risk…