Review
Culture
Trauma
5 min read

The overwhelm

What follows is an act of female emancipation. Belle Tindall reviews the Oscar-winning Women Talking.
a group of women stand and sit around a table lit by a gas lamp.
Women Talking's lead characters meet together.
Universal Pictures.

A trigger-warning to our readers: this article tackles the themes of sexual and physical abuse, which, for some readers, may make this piece a particularly hard one to read.  

The title to this film could be so many things: women forgiving, women fighting, women growing, women shrinking, women believing, women doubting, women conserving, women demolishing. If you find yourself settling down to watch Sarah Polley’s masterful film, you’ll witness eight women from a Mennonite community in America do all of this, and infinitely more.  

Women Talking will be unlike any film you’ve seen before.  

In an eerily context-less setting, the women of an isolated religious community come to the traumatic realisation that they have been abused, violently and systemically, for many years. This abuse has been at the hands of the men in their radically patriarchal community: their fathers, their brothers, their uncles, their sons. Catching one of these men red-handed, the women realise that what they had long been manipulated into thinking was either their own irrational imaginations or ghostly/demonic encounters, was actually sexual abuse perpetrated by the men they had shared their entire existence with. The men they had raised. The men who had raised them.  

Based on the acclaimed novel by Miriam Toews and inspired by a harrowing true story, the Oscar-winning script offers us a front row seat to the falling apart of an entire reality as these women begin to unravel all that they know to be true.  

Do they stay and forgive the men? Do they stay and fight to the (literal) death? Or do they leave and make a new home for themselves in an outside world they know nothing of? This is the question that drives the narrative of the film as eight representatives from three different families are tasked with coming to a decision, this is the conundrum that has the women talking.  

'This film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering.'

With a sense of specific time and place that is only given one opportunity to interrupt the narrative (in the form of a call for the residents to be counted in the 2010 census), there is a distinct sense that this story is tragically universal in its nature. As countless critics have observed, this film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering. It does not minimise the atrocities that these women and girls have experienced, nor does it sensationalise them. Through the immensely talented ensemble cast, Director, Sarah Polley has curated a spectrum of raw and complex emotion - brutal honesty, righteous anger, utter despair and rebellious hope are weaved together to create a tapestry of reaction.  

The complexity and care with which this story is told is a gift to the women who inspired the film, and to the women who will watch it.  

Audiences watch as the powerful rage of Salome (played by The Crown’s Claire Foy) is countered by the defiant gentleness of Ona (Rooney Mara), while the loud terror of Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is quelled by the silent care of Melvin (a transgender character played by August Winter). And, all the while, not one reaction is judged. Every woman is given the right to her own natural response, and the right to have that response shift and stretch and adjust. The dignity and love that flows out of this conversation is somewhat of a masterclass in the beginnings of healing and the liberation that follows.    

And yet, the film has even more to offer its audiences, there’s yet another question that is written into the rock of Women Talking, one which was articulated by the director herself  -

‘What does it mean to be true to your faith? What does it mean to get rid of the structures that have sprung up around your faith, that are insidious and corrupting?’ 

It is utterly fascinating: the women are determined to rid themselves, one way or another, of the men who have hurt them so deeply, but they refuse to be separated from the God whose name has been manipulatively enacted in the process. Where we are so used to the entanglement of God and the people who wrongfully use him as a means to an awful end, these women seem to demonstrate quite the opposite. And what’s more striking is that they do so, not out of obligation or duty, but out of pure love and hope.  

When the women speak of earthly things, there is a heaviness to their voices. When they speak of God, their words feel light.  

We see them recite the Bible in moments of overwhelm, meditate on it in moments of decision-making, pray it in moments of panic, and refer to it in moments of relief. It is their faith that fuels their rebellion, it is their belief in God that informs their desire for more. A verse from the Bible is ultimately the catalyst for their decision to leave, as they choose to re-build their lives on ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable’. It seems that if the oppressors wanted these women to believe that they were inherently less than, they simply should not have introduced them to a God who tells them differently.  

One of the most powerful monologues comes from a bruised and bleeding Mariche towards the end of the film. She says,

‘We have decided that we want, that we are entitled to, three things… we want our children to be safe, we want to be steadfast in our faith, and we want to think’.

Her weighty words are responded to with tears and with a song. The sound of the women singing the words ‘nearer my God to thee, nearer to thee’ becomes the soundtrack to them packing up their lives as they leave familiarity in search of freedom, a freedom which is not intended to create distance between them and God, but to bring them nearer to each other.  

To watch faith flow from the wounded is humbling. To see the complexities between God and hurt play out in this film is captivating. It feels compellingly honest, and messy, and real

The Oscar win and the endless five star-reviews are sufficient evidence of the power of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. But deeper evidence may also be found in the profound catharsis felt by those viewers who, in varying contexts, are trying to disentangle their faith from their hurt, or perhaps the curiosity of those who are left wondering what kind of a faith would ever be worth such an endeavour.  

 

 

Review
Comedy
Culture
Film & TV
4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.
Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins. 

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently. 

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer). 

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone. 

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun. 

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment. 

Comics are funny.  

Often the unexpected makes us laugh. 

Not laughing can be very hard. 

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh? 

 But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is. 

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.” 

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control. 

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within. 

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction. 

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts. 

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things. 

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us. 

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think. 

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” 

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.” 

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within. 

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery. 

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.