The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023: Winner of the Review Category

Women Talking: The blurred lines of forgiveness and revenge
Joshua Korber Hoffman

Indication of target audience: any reader of the arts section of a major broadsheet newspaper.
‘Forgiveness is good. Better than revenge.’ So implores Ona, a nun in the isolated Mennonite colony of Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning film, Women Talking. Polley’s screenplay, adapted from Miriam Toew’s novel based on a real Bolivian community, bursts with dialogue, without wasting a word. Painted with desaturated colours, Polley avoids all the clichés and broad-brush strokes of popular moral philosophy, instead drawing Toew’s characters with the care and empathy they deserve. As the women of the story battle with the simplified moral facts they have been taught about forgiveness and revenge, what emerges is a rare presentation of morality in all its cruel and unframeable tragedy.
In a Mennonite colony, a Protestant community that rejects participation in public life, women are serially drugged, raped and sexually assaulted for years. The women, who have no formal education, are led to believe that Satan, or their own female imagination, is to blame for the attacks. One night, a child catches a man fleeing her room, and he names the other perpetrators. The men are taken into police custody but are to be released two days’ later. The women face a terrible choice: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. After voting, they narrow it down to the latter two options. A conference is convened in the barn to decide.
While the women cannot read and rely on the sole benign man (August, played by Ben Whishaw) to take the minutes of the meeting, they know the Bible inside out. They believe in the teachings of Jesus, who says in Matthew 5:39 that ‘If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’. He teaches to forgive, not to avenge; to seek peace rather than violence. “Vengeance is mine”, saith the Lord. And thus, it is not yours.
So powerful were these words that they have become the abiding Western moral doctrine ever since. When South Africa emerged from the trauma of Apartheid, Bishop Desmond Tutu preached forgiveness, putting into political practice its most extreme endorsement; a real-life demonstration of Derrida’s paradox that true forgiveness is for the unforgivable. Yet, the subtlety of Polley’s writing summons our deepest sympathies to expose the fragility of the ostensibly firmly knotted moral truth that forgiveness is right, tugging at the fraying threads that hold it together. Faced with the women who want to stay and fight, one cannot help but wish, for their sakes, that their vengeance is fulfilled. It would take no-one short of God Himself to have the audacity to tell the women that they must forgive.
However, what nudges the film along is the audience’s implicit knowledge that the women must leave. At the end of the film, the child who first discovered the truth about the attacks explains why, better than any adult ever could: ‘We’re leaving because we cannot stay’. Her childish articulation emerges like a palimpsest from beneath the religious and philosophical teachings of adulthood – rich in their complexity, but often sententiously scribbled over what we knew all along.
The performances in Women Talking are captivating and the score is affecting. The second cue of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is “Speak up” – the imperative of the #MeToo movement, and of the subsequent spin-offs in various religious communities (#ChurchToo, #MosqueMeToo). In Polley’s film, “Speak up” is a cue to consider who should speak up, and when. August intervenes in the discussion before backtracking: “That is not my place”, he says.
What separates this film from others is how it leaves you clasping at your moral preconceptions like a baby trying to feel the texture of a drawing. In real life, while eight of the men in the Bolivian Manitoba Colony were imprisoned, the rapes continued. Violence against women and the social context that preserves its normality – not least the recent revelations of the social media radicalisation of young men – is not going anywhere. As long as the legal system fails to empower victims of injustice, one of the most tragic moral choices they face is between revenge and forgiveness, or between staying and fighting, and leaving forever. Sarah Polley’s film is a reminder that moral questions like this are never as simple as we are led to believe.
How my review is informed by Orwell’s influence
In November 1945, George Orwell published an article in the Tribune entitled ‘Revenge is Sour’. In the article, Orwell recounts his experience of being led round an American-run prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany by a Viennese Jewish man. In one part of the camp, he was shown the segregated section for S.S. officers. Orwell describes the Jewish man kicking one of the officers, exclaiming, ‘That’s the real swine!’
Orwell’s article delicately balances the sympathy he felt towards the Jewish man (‘It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis’) with the belief that, ultimately, ‘revenge […] is a childish daydream’. The brilliance of Orwell’s piece comes from his understanding of from where revenge originates: ‘Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also’. What we owe to vengeful victims of violence and injustice is not our moral condemnation, but our commitment to restoring the power of which our society has deprived them.
Upon watching Women Talking, my mind returned to Orwell’s article, which I had read during my university research on the philosophy of revenge. Orwell’s understanding of the moral blurred lines of revenge and forgiveness mirrors that of Sarah Polley (and that of Miriam Toews, from whose novel Polley adapted the script). Orwell’s declaration that ‘there is no such thing as revenge’ challenges our age-old conceptions of morality in the face of victimisation. Polley’s film evokes the same sentiment on screen.