But a movie has come along to usurp its spot in line -- that is, assuming Women Talking does not come up with an upset win for best picture this weekend.
That certainly seems like the wrong entry point to discussing the lone 2022 best picture nominee I hadn't seen, given that I watched it in conjunction with International Women's Day -- and that the very idea of a bridesmaid might be considered fundamentally anti-feminist, if not in casual usage, then certainly on a day like today.
Nonetheless, it's true -- I expect it to become officially eligible for this project next week, except that I've removed it from the queue preemptively.
The only reason I didn't see Sarah Polley's latest before my list closed was that it wasn't released in Australia until about three weeks after that -- February 16th, to be exact. In fact, I almost missed it, as the 4 p.m. showing in the theater downstairs from my work was the only one still on the schedule.
Probably unusual for a recently released best picture nominee before the Oscars have even aired, but that could be an indication of the tepid reception it's getting from audiences. (I haven't checked the box office, either here or in the U.S., and on a day designed to celebrate equal treatment for women around the world, I don't want to depress myself like that.)
Truth be told, I didn't contribute to its box office either. I used my critics card. However, I told myself that if they turned me down for any reason, I'd still pay for it. That's something I guess.
At least it'll show a ticket printed for this movie in its one showing on International Women's Day, which was being honored right above where I was watching the movie by a rally at the end of the street. I didn't know that was happening until after the movie got out, and trams on Collins Street were actually stopped for the gathering to occur. I would have liked to linger, except I had to get home to help with dinner. (In fact, I'm writing this at the train station, having missed stopping my train from departing by about three seconds.)
It hasn't been a lucky train day for me. In the morning, a track was broken, meaning buses replaced trains for part of the route in, and a trip that should have taken about 50 minutes took two hours. I even left home in time to catch an earlier train, in order to leave work early for Women Talking, all for naught.
But enough about me and the logistics that are very tangential to the aim of this post. Let's get to this movie.
At the start, the reaction was tepid from me as well. There is a purposeful artifice to Sarah Polley's approach to this story of women deciding whether they will leave a Mennonite community after multiple women of multiple ages have been drugged and raped by the community's abusive men. But we are wise to take heed of Polley's opening on-screen text: "What follows is an act of female imagination." As in, "Don't try to graft your version of realism onto it."
The first 30 minutes of the movie are very discourse heavy, as about eight women from three generations in three families debate two options that all the women in the community have voted on: whether to leave the community, or stay and fight. "Fight" is to be taken not in a physical sense, though one of the women has already tried to attack one of the men accused of these crimes. The men have shown themselves only too willing to quell any physical threat from the women with a violent retaliation that would be way out of scale with what the women intend. There were not enough votes for the option "stay and do nothing," so that has been taken off the table -- in itself a victory.
Because the women have purposefully not been educated -- they can neither read nor write -- they have asked a sympathetic man from the community, who had been away at university, to record the minutes of their meetings.
But because they have no formal or information education, one does wonder if they would express themselves as eloquently as they do here -- as eloquently as a screenwriter like Sarah Polley is capable of having them express themselves. At the start I was distracted by the notion that this is more appropriately one woman talking than eight, one voice rather than eight different voices of eight different characters who have eight different life experiences, even as sheltered as they are in this community.
Then I realized: This might be a problem if Polley intended to do that and didn't succeed. I don't think she intended to do that at all.
In their conversation -- which relaxes into less didactic scenes, not all located in this one barn, as the movie moves along -- the women have what amounts to an extended philosophical discussion of the meaning of forgiveness, its possibility to exist as such if not given genuinely and without coercion, and the extent to which it is even deserved by these awful men. And in this extended conversation, with its ebbs and flows and diversions, we do meet these characters and learn more about their individual histories, what makes them distinct, and what makes them not just Polley wearing slightly different masks.
I won't say that my early misgivings about Women Talking were forgotten by the end of the movie, but they were certainly banished to the distant background -- enough for me to award the film four stars on Letterboxd, when I started out thinking it might get only half of that.
How much did I contribute to the cause of International Women's Day by watching Women Talking today? When I didn't even pay for a ticket?
Not much, probably.
But it's not my role, really. My role is not to tell you all that women are equal to men and that women should be treated with respect and that assault against women in any form is a reprehensible act of cowardice by the man who perpetrates it. You already know this anyway.
My role is to listen, like the scribe who took the minutes for these women listens.
Even he steps beyond what is asked of him at times -- he can't help it. He does so in the meekest way and with the most earnestly helpful intentions, but his input is still not what's wanted by the women present -- not in that moment, not in that way.
We men can't help ourselves sometimes. We don't always know what to do. Often we don't know what to do. Even the best of us switch off listening mode and go into fixing mode. Even the best of us have a chivalry we can't always turn off, a chivalry that might be totally at odds with the situation and further accentuate a patriarchal mindset that is anathema to a day like today. On my various train rides today, I wondered if today, especially today, I should give up whatever seat I might have to a woman. Before immediately realizing that's not what International Women's Day is about, not in the slightest.
It's about listening, and making whatever change we need to make in our own lives so that the next International Women's Day feels just a little less direly needed than this one.
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