Just When We Begin to See Her Face
On the latest episode of Reel Shorts, guest critic, Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters looks at Sarah Polley’s revealing family documentary, Stories We Tell.
The true story lies among the other stories;
a mess of colors, like jumbled clothing,
thrown off or away,
like hearts on marble, like syllables
like butchers’ discards.
—Margaret Atwood, “True Stories”
“Thoughts ran in and out of my mind: it’s impossible, it couldn’t be. I’m dreaming.” Michael Polley stands before a studio microphone, reading his manuscript, that is, his memory of his reaction to a story revealed by his daughter, Sarah. She’s directing the scene of his reading, in her film, Stories We Tell. The story she told him in the past is now the basis for his story, his memory transformed first as he put it into words, and then again as he performs it. The film cuts to another scene of Michael, at his kitchen table, his hand to his forehead. “I was quite stunned,” he goes on, as the film cuts to a reenacted version of the moment he’s describing, in a couple of tight close-ups on his and Sarah’s faces. “My God, all this stuff we’ve been joking about for years. It’s actually true.”
The story that Polley has told her father concerns her actress mother, Diane, who died of cancer in 1990, when her daughter was just 11. It’s a story of deception and romance, of family and making movies. It shapes Stories We Tell, partly because it is repeatedly stunning, but more because it occasions a series of self-reflections, revelations, and reactions, all stories in themselves.
The film reveals itself as a set of stories right away, as interviewees settle into chairs and sofas, accommodating the frame, adjusting their images. Diane sits too, in black and white archival footage, on a stage, her hair pert and her smile brilliant. “The two cameras, you’re recording it visually,” Michael observes as he positions himself before the studio microphone. “It’s not the normal way to do this.” Sarah’s voice sounds from off-screen: “We told you it’s a documentary, but it’s actually an interrogation process.” He can’t hear her and so she repeats, “It’s an interrogation process that we’ve set up.” Cut from a two shot, Sarah on one side of the glass, Michael behind it, to the second camera’s shot, Michael on a stool: “Okay.”
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As Polley’s film assembles these stories, it becomes another story in itself. As one interview with Michael begins, a pair of hands claps, like a clapboard. “You realize,” Michael tells the camera and his daughter, “when you’ve finished all this…” And here he stops, to say it again. “When you’ve finished all this, about six hours of stuff and you’ll decide what you want out of all of it, it’ll be exactly like the story each one of us will pick out, if any one of us were trying to edit it and decide what we wanted to keep.”
“Exactly like,” in the sense of process, but of course, exactly unlike, in what’s edited. And that’s the story of Stories We Tell. “One of the main focuses in the documentary,” narrates Sarah Polley in the form of a letter she’s written, “are the discrepancies in the stories.” Everyone she interviews—her brothers and sisters, her dad, friends and colleagues of her mother, who was an actress too—remembers the past, their pasts, somewhat differently. A montage shows Polley setting up a camera, laughing with her brother, paging through a photo album, as she speaks. “The truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down,” she says, as you see a Super 8 home movie of her family at a table, white curtains behind them. The scene cuts again, the camera shows Polley on a set, directing this home movie, revealed now to be a reenactment. “And many of our stories,” she adds, “when we don’t take proper time to do research about our pasts, which is almost always the case, end up with shifts and fictions in them, mostly unintended.”
To read the rest of the review, click here!