I can't understand why I am exposing us all in this way . . . . Is this the tsunami that she unleashed when she went, and all of us still flailing in her wake, trying to put her together in the wreckage, and her slipping away, over and over, just as we begin to see her face? - Sarah Polley, in an email to her father Michael Polley
Looking to see what family connections there possibly could be connected to me and enjoy building hopefully a happy picture - From the profile of a recent DNA match to the Resident Fan Boy
Stories We Tell has that quality shared by all of my favourite films: the ability to draw me back, again and again, noticing new details every time; being a completely different movie every damn time.
The subject is the gradual revelation of a family scandal, and how widely the narrative varies: from those directly involved, to the those affected by it, to those who witnessed aspects of it.
We tend to screen books, music, and movies through our own uppermost concerns, so my first viewing of Stories We Tell, about ten years ago, reminded me of the myth-making and myth-busting of family research and the resulting clashes of narratives and identity. More personally, I had a similar, but not identical, revelation in my own family at almost the same time, resulting in everyone affected having to rewrite their own family story. I think few amateur genealogists fully appreciate the risks of their research, but this risk applies to anyone setting out to tell the story of their relatives.
Our changes in perception are constantly evolving, so a few months ago, I re-watched the film following the tsunami in the wake of the death of Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died last spring. The figurative family bombshell that hit Sarah Polley's family about a decade and a half after the death of their matriarch is not of the legacy-tarnishing quality as that affecting the Munro family, but it was also deliberately kept out of the papers, initially to protect Michael Polley, Sarah's father, and then, because this documentary was being made.
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| Sarah Polley in the 1980s with parents Michael and Diane |
Diane Polley, an actor and casting director, died in 1990, when Sarah Polley, then a busy child actor and now an award-winning writer, was eleven. Diane had four older children: John and Suzy Buchan, from her first marriage, and Mark and Joanna Polley, from her second marriage. They all take their seats at the beginning of the film, like a family gathering at an intervention - except none of them are in the same room; this is footage from separate interviews, during which Sarah Polley asked each to "tell the whole story, from the beginning", as if to someone who is hearing it for the first time. The backing music is "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver: And I told you to be balanced/ And I told you to be kind....
And the late Diane Polley also seems to take her place as well, via footage of an audition from the mid sixties. But she doesn't say a word.
Someone who doesn't take a seat is Sarah Polley herself, who deliberately keeps silent through most of the film, aside from the occasional question or brief comment, and appears in the occasional re-enactment of events, but with no soundtrack. Sometimes this makes her presence seem oddly impassive, but, as her father astutely points out, she has the ultimate control over what makes it into the film.
Here, I must alert you to spoilers, if you're planning on watching this movie -- and you should.
Polley moves back and forth in time, revealing the surprises and twists out of sequence, but closer to the timeline of their discovery. She illustrates events with authentic family movies and (*first spoiler*) reconstructed Super 8 footage, using actors. The Resident Fan Boy didn't notice the latter, but I did, mainly because I recognised Rebecca Jenkins, a friend of Diane's, an actor who also sang back-up for Jane Siberry in the eighties.
Polley is careful to illustrate the differences in the many narratives about (*big* spoiler) finding out the identity of her birth father. The stories are similar, but vary in small, but important, details, revealing, in particular, the biases of her father, actor Michael Polley, and her birth father, producer/writer Harry Gulkin. At one point, Gulkin tells Sarah, with some intensity, that the story belongs to him, because he's the one surviving person who experienced it directly. (I have to restrain myself from shouting at the screen every damn time - if the story belongs to anyone, it's Sarah Polley herself.)
One of Polley's greatest assets is the thoughtful articulateness of her interviewees, particularly her siblings, all evidently very bright people with greater comfort in front of a camera than most people. It's particularly fun when her brothers give her a hard time, in the way that big brothers do.
Close to the end, we have another moving montage of the storytellers, this time to "Demon Host" by Timber/Timbre: All those messages you sent, clear as day/ But in the night, oh, I couldn't get it right.... The camera lingers on each bereft face: Diane's grown children, her husband, her lover, her friends, her brother. Years later, she is clearly so missed.
Michael Polley and Harry Gulkin both died six years after the release of this film, within a few months of each other.
The unreliable narrator is a new concept for me, and I seem to be coming up against the term multiple times over the past few months. (Don't know how I missed this while studying literature in university.) This film demonstrates that we are all unreliable narrators; human memory is just too malleable and mutable.
I think Harry Gulkin was mistaken. The truth, while ever elusive, is closer through the mesh of narratives, rather than sticking to one voice -- even if that seems the more intelligible way.
But then, perhaps truth is never singular.
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