‘Women Talking’ Review: The Power of Speech

Sarah Polley adapts Miriam Toews’s novel into a timely political parable with a stellar ensemble cast.

By A.O. Scott

Every so often, “Women Talking” lets its attention wander away from its main concern (which is, as you might have guessed, women talking) to observe the hands of girls as they draw pictures, play complicated clapping and string-figure games or braid one another’s hair into intricate plaits. The grace and discipline of those activities, and the creativity they express, are woven into the film itself, which seems plain-spoken almost to the point of artlessness and turns out to be as layered and whorled as a hand-woven tapestry.

The women are members of an agrarian religious community that has kept its distance from modernity. An outsider’s pickup truck blasting the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” is one of a handful of signs that this movie, directed by Sarah Polley from a novel by Miriam Toews, takes place anywhere near the present.

Toews’s book was suggested by actual events that took place from 2005 to 2009 at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the film version doesn’t specify a location. That vagueness reflects both the universality of the story’s themes and what the women know of the secular world, which is very little. Though many of them can recite the Bible from memory, they haven’t been taught to read and write.

Their educations have been minimal, but their wisdom, acquired through farm and household labor, child-rearing, prayer and intuition, is vast. Or at least sufficient to spur the emergence of a powerful and sophisticated collective political consciousness. How they arrive at a clear understanding of their oppression and potential liberation is the film’s subject, a source of suspense, emotion and inspiration. Read the full review at the New York Times.