In all of its genuine messiness, its insistence on a multi-stranded narrative, its capricious flaunting and taunting of truth, Stories We Tell finally does what I have been wanting to see in cinema for years.
Sarah Polley tells the story of her mother’s life and legacy through the eyes of her family. It sounds so simple, and yet the story as it progresses serves the purpose of both delineator and obfuscator of the truth. Polley uses narrative forms of memoir and interview to provide a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the same story. As the film and the lives of her parents and siblings unravel so does our adherence to a singular truth loosen.
It is, to put no finer point on it, a significant achievement. Many writers and directors have previously explored this area but never have I seen it on such an intensely personal scale.
Ever since as a lad I witnessed a news report from Soweto of a ‘riot’ that took place outside a church, the tyranny of the lens has kept me circumspect. What seemed intense violence in close up tracked back to reveal a scene of near mundane indifference. In the wide shot passers by shuffled along a dusty rural road and a little scuffle took place on the steps of a church where, if I remember right, Desmond Tutu spoke to a tiny audience. It was over in a second. That was when I truly appreciated the power of the camera for the first time and I have nursed a strong mistrust of it ever since.
Polley lays the machinations of her narrative bare to the bone. I haven’t seen the rushes but the process of selecting what is kept in and what is not, as her own father complains as he is being interviewed, “will become the story you [Polley] want to tell”.
Polley never tries to hide the fact that she has done this… and that is exactly the point.
Stories We Tell gains weight and force as the documentary progresses and the many perceptions of “truth”, as we call it, heighten the real underlying meaning of the film. It rolls you over and brings you back, like a wave of suppressed emotion washed upon uncertain shores, wondering how we could ever have been so conceited as to believe we have the right of things.
It is a call for tolerance more powerful than any political rally, as painfully honest as the most difficult family Christmas, and as unflinching an eye as ever has been cast upon one family in film.
The film lifts us, in the end, out of the dogma of the single narrative into a place that allows a kind of healthy uncertainty to deconstruct the walls that keep us apart.
Postmodernism can be heartfelt… who knew?
It holds you until its last moments. The film’s strength is in the love Polley has for her family and her uncanny ability to keep us there, loving them along with her, in the face of their flaws… no, possibly because of them.
And that, it must be said in this context, is my subjective opinion. You are free to form your own but try asking the people on either side of you what they thought: you might be surprised at how different things can look from one seat away.
Stories We Tell screened as part of the Possible Worlds Festival of American and Canadian Cinema, a very promising line-up of films screening at Dendy Opera Quays and Dendy Newtown, 8-18 August. Book at www.possibleworlds.net.au.
