By Jonathan Kolb M.D.
Spoiler Alert: There are surprises in this film. Do not read what follows if you have not seen the film, and want to have the experience that it provides.
The Stories We Tell, a film by Sarah Polley, played in some Festivals and opened to good reviews in the Spring of 2013. In a variety of formats, from black and white home movies to what seem like old color sequences, and more contemporary sequences shot in a studio, it tells the story of the Director Sarah Polley’s family, organized around the family joke/mystery/absence left by her mother, and the question of whether Sarah was conceived during a brief affair of her mother’s. The film is ostensibly a documentary, though Sarah (one of the characters, as well as the director) calls it an “interrogation,” made from her search for the untold story of her family, her mother (who died young) and her origins. It concerns a theatrical family, and so this “baby’ of the family, as well as others, took lots of home movies with fancy cameras. The home movies, as well as more recent footage shot during the “interrogation” process, provide the bulk of the images that tell the story, narrated by Sarah’s father, who gets credit for the screenplay.
Polley also directed the films Take This Waltz and Away from Her. Each of these films concerns a married woman getting romantically involved with a new man, though in entirely different circumstances. Since the current movie is offered as a documentary, about the people in Polley’s family, especially her mother and herself, I believe the psychoanalyst-discussant has more leeway to treat the central characters as real people, not just dream elements in the creative process of the auteur.
At first it seems a simple matter, the story of Sarah’s attempt to find out more about her mother, who died of cancer (without acknowledging that she was going to die?) when Sarah was 11.
The film is sort of Rashomon meets Mamma Mia. It is presented as a search for the truth, about Sarah’s mother, Diane, about what happened during the time Sarah was conceived. Who is the father of this child? As the movie proceeds, it seems that truth is not so elusive, once the main secret-keeper is dead. It is interpretation that is more problematic, with each of the main actors seeing the past with a different slant.
Part of the charm and mystery of this movie is the mixing of clips from different eras, as well as words from the different tellers of the story. The film intermixes grainy old black-and-whites from Sarah’s childhood, footage from the time of the inquiry when the secret is discovered (more or less), and studio shots made (later) when the film was being constructed. I think the confusion and jumble in the little/big girl’s mind is recreated in our experience watching the film, trying to reconcile who is who, in the different clips from different eras in different formats. There is also the issue of artifice, which is hidden behind the idea that this film is a documentary. More on this below.
Among the most striking things for me are the following: Diane contemplated an abortion of the pregnancy in question. This puts a life-and-death anxiety into Sarah, the filmmaker, and us. The contemplated abortion also undercuts the sentimentality and idealization of this full-of-life mother, whom we all miss so much. Yes, Diane was larger than life, and full of spirit, but that is not all she was, her conflict over ending the pregnancy reminds us.
Sarah’s father Michael is the writer and narrator. Intriguingly, the director Sarah includes a couple of moments when she asks him to reread his lines, and she includes all that in the film: the old reading, the director’s intervention, and the new reading. In this way, she is reminding us that the film is her product, her story, not his.
Michael’s narrative seems to fit, in some way, with his ideas about himself as a husband. Michael and Diane met when he was acting in a play; he feels his wife fell in love with the character he played – not him. He rates himself a disappointment. He takes pains to locate some of the deadness in the marriage as coming from him – he refers to himself as a “dead wombat” of a husband, sexually. Responding to that image, I thought of a closeted gay identity, and a reference to erectile dysfunction. But maybe I’m being too literal. At one point of high emotion, when Sarah stops his narration, he comments, “I really convinced myself,” referring to his acting, his reading of the narrative he has written. It is as if he feels most real to himself, in a way, as an actor, or hides behind this idea of his being more vivid as an actor than as a father/husband/lover. Part of the gift or task of the film project is to catalyze his return to creativity – as a writer.
The siblings who are interviewed at length all show their anxiety about doing harm or feeling pain. Mark (a brother of Sarah’s) mentions having been instructed by his lawyer not to speak. The other brother, John, cries as he shows his pain about his mother’s abandonment of her first family (him!), and the pain is raw and unresolved. This is often the way it works, in the film, and in general when families try to unpack sequestered and un-discussed family secrets. Responding to the question of what impact Sarah’s inquiries have had on the family, as she’s pursued the idea of her mother’s affair, her sister Joanna says, “Oh, nothing much – oh, I guess we all got divorced!” All the girls got divorces, including Sarah herself. So is this film Sarah’s attempt to understand aspects of herself, to link them with her mother’s secrets, and conflicts, and life choices?
There is a conventional, romantic drift to the part of the film where Sarah meets Harry, her biological father. We hear about the torrid affair between Diane and Harry. Who wouldn’t want to be the product of such a union? Instead of slipping into romanticism, the film gets more complex at this point, when the principal characters start to struggle about whose intellectual property this is, who is authorized to tell the story. Sarah manages to fall in love with Harry, as her mother did, and then reject his possessiveness, as he declares that this story is his story, the story of a perfect love. She chooses to protect her father, Michael, and return to him, bringing him the gift of the writing task. It seems the deepest love is between the father and the daughter, the pair who survived the death of Diane together and drew very close. In the writing, Michael shows a kind of generosity of spirit (which may also be a claim, more than a reality). But Sarah keeps the creative control of the storytelling for herself.
One psychoanalytic concept that this film touches on is nachtraglichkeit. Freud used this term (currently translated as “deferred action” in English, “après-coup” in French) to refer to the fact that memories are changed over time, in our heads, as we develop – and develop the capacity to understand them in a more complex way. I think the people in the film struggle and differ not so much around what happened, but around how they understand it. And indeed, their understandings differ at different points in their lives.
Terry Gross interviewed Polley about this film on NPR the week before it opened. The interview became especially interesting when she (Gross) referred to her prior interview with the actress several years earlier. Polley had noted, in that earlier interview, that she liked characters with secrets, and that the two feature films she had directed were about married women straying from their husbands. Even when she was not directing but acting, playing a character without a secret, she liked to pretend that she had a secret. She felt it gave her acting more depth. The way in which we are organized around unspoken, unconsciously known family secrets is powerfully evoked in the interview, and in the film.
Audience reaction to this film, including on the night we discussed it at “Off the Couch,” has included a sense of confusion and betrayal about the use of staged scenes, and actors, in the making of this “documentary.” Many audience members felt that the implicit contract between the filmmaker and the audience was broken by this deception. Though in interviews the director brushed aside this concern, it does seem to enact a kind of transfer to the audience of the sense of being deceived, which Polley and her family all struggled with. We tell stories to make sense of the unthought known (Bollas), the things we have lived through or been given, without explanation.
