This story about “Women Talking” first appeared in the problem below the line from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
on the surface, Sarah Polley’s “Talking Women” is one of the best examples of a 2022 film largely taking place in one place. Polley adapted the Miriam Toews novel, which itself was based on the true story of a Mennonite clan in Bolivia that was plagued by sexual abuse, and the action rarely breaks out of a barn hayloft in an isolated community.
In that loft, a group of women has been appointed to decide for all the women in the community, who must choose whether to flee from the men who have been systematically drugging and raping them or to stay in the only place that many of them have known. .
“It was a really fun challenge,” production designer Peter Cosco said of putting most of the film in one place. “We found a great looking barn (outside Toronto), but there were a lot of discrepancies between the actual barn and what we needed. I had to come up with a truss system to support the structure with minimal posts, so there was nothing to block the camera or get in the way of the actors.
“It was figuring out how to make a barn structure that felt good but was somehow the complete opposite of how you actually build a barn.”
The idea, Polley added, was to give a sense of importance to the place where women make their life-changing decisions. “We talked a lot about the idea of a cathedral,” she said. “It’s a barn, it’s a haystack, but it’s also a sacred space.”
Actors working in that space included Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and Frances McDormand, plus Ben Whishaw as the loft’s sole male occupant, who is there to document the proceedings because the women of the colony is kept illiterate. The women are dressed simply and severely, their wardrobe choices as restrained as the barn walls.
“There are so many restrictions in the lives of these women,” said costume designer Quita Alfred, who grew up in Canada’s Mennonite communities. “Those dresses are meant to deny these women, to remind them of their subjugation to God and to their husbands and other men in their families.
“So we did our best to show little flashes of expression and personality in something as simple as a color or embroidery on a headscarf. It may not even be apparent to the audience, but it helped the actors go to the places they needed to go for their characters.”
Cinematographer Luc Montpellier said one of the key instructions Polley gave him was: “I want the photograph to feel as epic as the decision they have to make.” And the barn helped him do that. “Our challenge was to make a film, not a play,” he said. “I think every decision we made visually was tied to the cathedral look of the barn.
“We could easily have built the barn as a small, claustrophobic space, and there was some discussion about whether to make it enclosed. But the cinema is the cinema. We wanted to show the conformity and the unwavering faith and the heaviness of their world, but it was also important to see the beauty in things.”
For Polley, it was also important that the film had real pacing: if the characters are going to stay in one place, the film needs to move. “It couldn’t be delayed because we are already asking the audience for something,” she said. “But it took a long time to find what the movie wanted to be.”
Editors Roslyn Kalloo and Chris Donaldson worked with Polley to set the pace and cut the fat. “The acting was so good that on a first pass you could just follow the dialogue around the room,” said Kalloo, who went to work when shooting began. “And then Chris came on board and the movie totally benefited from a new set of eyes.”
“On one level, you could say the script had been pushed as far as it could go when I came along,” said Donaldson, who had worked with Polley several times in the past. “But eventually you have to put the script aside and find the movie. And the process of getting to 97 minutes was really distillation, distillation, distillation.”
A key move, he said, was to change the film’s narrator from the character played by Ben Whishaw to a girl who had been a background character. “Suddenly,” she said, “everything became very elastic.”
As Polley and her team talked about the film, the conversation eventually turned back to the location, not just to that room in the barn, but to everything around it. “Peter built a city,” Polley said. “It’s not entirely clear in the movie, but none of that was there. He planted crops, built roads, and built a town. He was a little crazy ”.
She shook her head. “I know everyone says, ‘It just takes place in a haystack!’ But in fact, it’s not like that.”
Read more of the issue below the line here.
