A version of this “Talking Women” story first appeared in the Guilds & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
“Mujeres Hablando,” the 2018 novel by author Miriam Toews, was inspired by a serial sexual assault case in Bolivia, where more than a hundred Mennonite women were tranquilized and raped by men in their isolated community. Hearing the gruesome real-life details, it’s easy to imagine the kind of true-crime sensation the story might have caused in the form of lurid docuseries.
But that wasn’t what motivated actress-turned-director Sarah Polley (Away From Her) to direct this film adaptation. “This is not a film that details graphic sexual assault,” Polley said. “It’s about the impact on the women who have survived and how they want to move on. It seemed to me more like an epic story of hope, almost like a fable. The conversation in the film goes one step further (beyond the crime), as it does in the novel, which makes me excited to tell it.”
The film is primarily set in a barn hayloft, where several women serve as democratic representatives for all women in the community, debating the question of whether they should stay or go.
The ensemble cast includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, along with veteran actresses Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, plus Ben Whishaw as a schoolteacher who is on hand to take meeting notes. (Only men are allowed an education; women are all illiterate.)
“The one location was overwhelming,” said casting director John Buchan, who along with Jason Knight spent six months compiling cast lists for each role. “So we looked at a lot of people with theater backgrounds, and we realized that they could work on one set while being willing to try different things and get out of their comfort zone.”
Meanwhile, Polley was also thinking hard about how the performers would mesh together as a group, especially since some of the characters are related to one another. “That was a complicated puzzle,” she said. “It was hard to cast a person without knowing who the rest of her family would be, so we had to cast people in groups. We could believe in a family once everyone was in it.”
One such family is headed by the warm but firm Agata, played by Ivey. The two-time Tony Award winner humorously admitted that she was a little intimidated that her daughters in the film were the ex-Lisbeth Salanders: Mara in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2011) and Foy in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” (2018). “That was a bit intense when I first realized it,” Ivey said with a laugh. “But they’re both amazing and it was an incredible privilege to play her mother.”
Ivey based much of his performance on his grandmother from Texas, who was born in 1894 and lived to be 90 years old. “She was truly a happily religious woman in the sense that she was open-minded and respectful of everyone. I tried to emulate her rooting and especially her laugh. My character is the one who holds the center, so if the conversation gets sidetracked by someone’s anger, tears, or panic, she’s there to refocus it for the group.”
The other wise old lady in the cast, Greta, is played by McCarthy, the treasured Canadian actress who once appeared as Polley’s mother in a 1991 series called “The Hidden Room.” In the film, Greta is affected by ill-fitting dentures as a result of her sexual abuse. For McCarthy, that detail opened up a lot of physical and emotional access to the character. “It’s very meaningful, the idea that her teeth would be the reminder of her rape,” she said. “I always held a tissue to my mouth, constantly aware that she would have a sore mouth all the time. But it also seemed profound to me that they had taken her voice away from her and now she is finding it again, even if it is with these teeth that do not fit. For me, it was huge.”
Also important to McCarthy was the downtime the film offered all the actors to spend together. “Life certainly reflected the passionate conversation that takes place in the movie,” she said. “There were a lot of discussions about current issues, American politics, the elections in Canada. But we also had a lot of laughs and we talked about the good sales on (retail site) Free People, we talked about dinner, we talked about what we were watching at night on Netflix.” (Her pick of him to chill: “The Great British Baking Show.”)
Discussions between Polley and his actors also led the writer-director to tweak the script. “We had a great full read with a lot of the cast and it made me rewrite things,” Polley said. “The script was a very living document. And people brought things to the table in terms of dialogue. At one point, Sheila mentioned to me that she knew someone in an abusive relationship and this person told her, ‘I’m leaving because I can’t stay.’ And I put that line in the script.”
Elsewhere, in perhaps the most resonant and emotional moment of the entire film, one of the actors deleted a single word of his dialogue. The Choice provides a complex human moment of elevation during a pivotal final scene.
“This was a Jessie Buckley special,” Polley said with a proud smile. “It was near the end of the movie and Jessie was supposed to say, ‘I suddenly feel so powerful.’ Her character is physically hurt and quite emotional at that point, and Jessie said to me, ‘I don’t know if I can get the whole line out.’ And we realized: you don’t need the last word on that line for the audience to understand what you mean. I loved the choice she made.”
General camaraderie was essential to Polley. In fact, during the first few rehearsals with the cast on the hayloft stage, the filmmaker instituted a rule that if someone was having a hard time for any reason, rehearsals would stop and the cast would take a break. “And on the third or fourth day of rehearsal, someone was having a hard time and we went outside for a bit,” Polley recalled. “And I gave the person the option to end the day, but they wanted to come back. And the entire cast had formed a circle on the floor with a space for them. The generosity poured out in a way that was truly palpable. And I was like, ‘Wow, this really is a community.’
