I saw the movie over a week ago, but I’m still thinking about it. It’s a travesty that Sarah Polley didn’t get a Best Director nomination for it. The movie is beautiful — a really moving portrayal of women being in community together. I was just finishing reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy when I saw it, which inflected my take on it, of course, as fundamentally a movie about a group of women who are working towards change; trying to articulate their values and beliefs, and make decisions about what kind of future they want.
Of course, it’s also a movie about crime, punishment, and retributive versus restorative justice. And about patriarchy, and agency, and accountability. The power of the movie, and its philosophical quality, lies in the way that it not only stages various arguments, but also how it embodies the various positions in concrete individuals, richly, yet subtly, contextualizing those arguments by alluding to broader swathes of lived experience. Mostly through flashbacks, but also through body language and facial expression.
This was, for me, the most incredible aspect of the movie: the way it minutely observed a variety of affects, on multiple levels; individual, inter-personal, collective, and the modulations between them. How one person suddenly explodes in rage she has been bottling up; how two people sit off to the side and whisper, or exchange a flirtatious glance, or a look that indexes a longer history of power struggles between parent and child; how everyone suddenly, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, starts laughing at the same time. It’s absolutely amazing, and one of the most vividly poignant depictions of what it is like when a bunch of women assemble that I have ever seen.
I could not help but think about how very very white the movie is — literally, in the bleached out colorscale, but also more troublingly, in its imaginary. It’s set in an enclosed religious community whose members are entirely white, so it’s not surprising that there are no people of color to be seen, but there’s something uncanny about watching a movie that stages the sufferings of women whose bodies are blithely exploited by men and have it be so entirely white. Especially as the women repeatedly refer to their home as “the colony” — I couldn’t help but think about the fact that Black and Indigenous women’s bodies have been the ground zero of this kind of exploitation and abuse under regimes of colonialism, enslavement, white supremacy, etc, that is here figured as a more generalized problem of how men treat women. And I couldn’t help but think about how white women have participated in those processes even as they have suffered under them, particularly when the women in the movie started talking about where they would “settle.” Where will they go? What will that process of “settling” involve? The film’s imagery evokes refugees but also “pioneers,” with no hint of the double meanings at play. There’s a brief interlude in the film where a census worker arrives that vaguely suggests that the larger setting is North America, but when I got a copy of the novel, it mentions that it’s based on real events that took place in Bolivia, in a colony named after the Canadian province of Manitoba. The women in the movie, it is made very clear, have no idea where they are, or what the larger world is like. Which opens onto a somewhat terrifying vision of a world with nothing but white people, and the suggestion that the movie is inviting us to inhabit that perspective, a kind of fantasy of white innocence. But the movie offers us some glimpses, shades of dramatic irony, especially in the figure of August, the note-taker. Which is to say, there could be some space for a little more critical distance on the matter of what happens when white people decide to start a new colony…
I’m very curious to read the novel — when I posted about the movie on facebook, some friends said that they had loved the book, and can hardly imagine how a movie could do it justice, especially to the particularity of its narrative voice. I, meanwhile, can’t fathom how a novel — especially one written in the first-person voice! — could capture that incredible multiplicity of perspectives without privileging any of them; the amazing sense of all these very different women in one place. It’s a delicious invitation to think about the difference of cinematic and novelistic perspective. I’ll report back once I’ve read it!
Kasia Reads 