(2.9) If football is not your thing, this might be a good weekend for getting out of the house. Playing now at the Avon, “Women Talking” follows a group of women in an isolated religious colony as they struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony’s men. Based on a novel by Miriam Toews and directed by Sarah Polley, the movie stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Frances McDormand.
A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times:
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 or a time. 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. . . 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.
“Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. They will not do nothing.”
(This week we mourn the decision in Roe v. Wade, now undone by Dobbs through the efforts of “Christian” men who have made it abundantly clear that complete control over women is their goal.)
Rated PG-13. Running time: 104 minutes. Hours daily: 4:05pm and 6:20pm (except Tuesday which is only 4:05pm).
Through February 9, Avon Cinema, 260 Thayer Street, (directions)