STORIES WE TELL

Sarah Polley  

(Canada)

STORIES WE TELL is a masterful and autobiographical re-telling of actual and archival events, a mosaic docu-narrative about Sarah Polley's enchanting mother who dies young, and the possibility that she has a different bio father from all her siblings. The story is unbound as a release of truth from all sides.   Polley's mother connects and disconnects the dots. Polley holds the space for her family to speak freely. She also plays with them a bit, letting there be a montage of reactions to her line of questioning, or giving them the same chance to be silent with their memory, or having expressed it, to own it. Her brother Johnny is her casting director, and in his inherent charm almost steals the show as Polley’s mother might. Polley, an actor in her own right, and a successful director of other non autobiographical non docs, plays it straight, giving everyone else their voice. She asks her own father (but is it?) to repeat lines he himself wrote, whether for emotional emphasis, for him to realize what he’s written, or for her to digest, or for the audience to register. In a fascinating turn, we don’t quite know how she feels, though she’s an actress, and her skill here is in not playing a character. She holds back, as a quarter turn to her mother in absentia holding forth. Polley is controlling the scenes but also she is retreating, for emphasis. She wants others to come across with the truths they’ve all withheld from her. She found out the big news later in her life, (she admits it is a seismic shift), and is still in ways digesting it. There are some very amusing and hilarious moments in this incredibly sensitive and moving family story. Nothing is funnier than when she is playing a Neanderthal as an actress on set, a screaming scene in a cave as she finds out that a journalist is going to run a story on her two fathers before she has spoken to the only person that doesn’t know yet. She runs out to a park dressed in her Neanderthal get-up and is crying and pleading with the journalist not to run the story as people look on aghast. The Neanderthal scene is quite winning and gives the film a wide berth of comic relief for the serious turn the plot has just taken. There are recreations of actual archival footage mixed in with archival footage, interwoven with interviews with the actual family members. The only interview we don’t get is with Polley’s mom. The whole film exists because of her, and pivots on the truths behind her non-stop movement while alive. Polley, as director, gives her mother the starring role in memoriam, and squares her own history right into the present perfect.