Why ‘They Talk’ should be the favorite of the Oscars 2023 and is one of the best films of the year

‘They Talk’ Could Have Been One of the Favorite Movies at the 2023 Oscars, and instead has become the most underrated movie of the season. The power of its female cast led by Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, Sarah Polley’s brilliant and epic staging, her spirit of revolution and feminist protest… Everything makes it a film as fascinating as it is relevant, as shocking as it is necessary. . They talk and we listen.

The film follows a group of Mennonite women who have lived their entire lives in a religious colony in Bolivia and now they must question their beliefs and customs to put an end to the situation of patriarchal violence in which they live: the men in their community have been abusing them for years, sneaking into their rooms at night and drugging them to sexually assault them, later blaming Satan. But religious excuses are no longer enough and the women take advantage of the fact that the men have gone to take out the last rapist on duty at the police station to raise a revolutionary conversation against the clock: stay and fight? Leave? Do nothing?

we review the four main keys of ‘Ellas habland’ (from the original title ‘Women Talking’) and we justify why it will be one of the best films of 2023, with or without Oscars.

‘They speak’: the origins of the adaptation

Author Miriam Toews defines her book, ‘They Talk’, as “an act of female imagination.” This is also defined in the first image of her, the film adaptation of her, directed by Sarah Polley, and what follows is a painful and revealing conversation between a group of women who, from different positions, try to escape patriarchal violence.

“This book went through me and made me ask myself questions that I had been dealing with consciously, and I think it articulated many things that I had been dealing with unconsciously,” said the director as she passed through the London Festival. “It complicated a lot of conversations that had been going on around us”, she added, referring to the coincidence between the publication of the book in 2018 and the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, and also noted its relevance at a time when women’s rights are once again under threat. The director explained: “This book tends to spark a conversation: people listen and talk with the ability to change their minds, with real conversations where people don’t yell at each other, but accept nuances and pitfalls”.

But how did it all start? Curiously, with one of the actresses in his cast. As well as a veteran three-time Oscar-winning actress, Frances McDormand has an enviable eye as a producer and promoter of projects. With an initiative that he already took with ‘Nomadland’ (Chloe Zhao, 2021), McDormand read Toews’ book and quickly began to develop its adaptation together with producer Dede Gardner from Plan B.

“I was interested in making it a debate with a sense of humor, as well as hope and possibilities for the future”, says the actress in the production notes of the film. Sarah Polley’s name came up immediately for the role of writer-director. Things of fate, it turns out that the Canadian had already been interested in adaptation for a long time.

‘They speak’: the true story of the Mennonites

After enduring sexual assaults from men in her community for years, the women of ‘Ellas hablando’ face three options: carry on as before, start a war to improve your situation or go to another place where you can start from scratch.

The search for an answer is at the center of the film, which is set in a Mennonite community, a pacifist side of Anabaptist Christians. Despite the particularity of her setting, Polley sought universality, and the only way to do so was by creating a mosaic of emotional journeys for each character and having a cast to match.. “It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time,” Polley acknowledged of having “nine people stuffed into a room going through heaven and hell together for eight weeks.”.

The cast is made up of actresses from different generations who do a fabulous job. Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara take the lead with more prominence in the role of adult women and mothers, while veterans like Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and Frances McDormand bring great strength to the cast. It is hard to believe that none of them has slipped between the 2023 Oscar nominees for Best Leading Actress or the 2023 Oscar nominees for Best Supporting Actress. Along with them, the young women who take the pulse of their more experienced colleagues shine: Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett and Abigail Winter. Along with Ben Whishaw as the only man in the room, the cast of ‘They Talk’ is stunning.

‘They speak’: a tone between intimacy and epic

Polley, whom some will remember as the protagonist in ‘My Life Without Me’ (2003) and ‘The Secret Life of Words’ (2005) by Isabel Coixet (two of the best Spanish films in history) or the remake of ‘Amanecer of the dead’ (Zack Snyder, 2004), made her directorial debut with ‘Far from her’ (2006), but she had not been on the big screen for a decade. With ‘Ellas hablan’ he returns with one goal: not to fall short of epic to show the conversation at the center of the story: “We think this conversation between women should feel like it’s going to split the world in two: it’s not subtle, and it shouldn’t be.”

As the director says, “if this were a conversation between men about changing the world”, there would be no doubt of its weight and importance. “These women are facing a monumental task, and I wanted to give them that breadth, that space,” she defends. “She wanted each frame to unleash the infinite potential and possibilities contained in a conversation about rebuilding a broken world.”

‘They speak’: a lesson on breaking the silence

The title says it all: they speak to break the silence, so that oppression takes shape through words and solutions are articulated aloud. The result is powerful, and a reflection of all the timeless issues that Polley drew from the source material:

“Questions about forgiveness, faith, systems of power, trauma, healing, guilt, community, and self-determination…but it also left me feeling amazingly hopeful”

The word is the engine that moves the protagonists through long talks and very hard personal experiences. On them weighs a countdown and a decision to be made. Whatever the end result, the trip will not have been in vain.