Like songs, poems, books and the live stage, films are another medium for storytelling. Even the most simplistic (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The Lumiere Brothers, 1896) or experimental (Wavelength, Michael Snow, 1967) cinema communicates something to its audience, no matter how straightforward (the former a 50-second shot of exactly what its title promises) or abstract (the latter a 45-minute zoom shot directed towards a window in a room.) Arguably the best films either relay a story like none other or do so in ways few (if any) other films have tried. One might regard this as a challenge given the sheer amount of work this relatively young medium has already produced; even accounting for the small fraction of it that’s truly great (on Letterboxd, for example, I’ve given only about 250 out of 4500 movies (6%) a five-star rating), it’s easy to be critical/skeptical of finding new films that surpass or at least measure up to one’s favorites.

Still, I’d argue the notion that “it’s all been done” actually sustains an interest in filmgoing: one rarely knows when you will find something new to enter into your own canon of great movies. To develop a critical eye is to recognize when something is a rare gem, a work presenting a world clearly distinguishing itself from others while also meaningful in how it accomplishes this. Consider the titles I’ve included in this project so far: An irreverent, satirical take on the Arthurian legend that resolves itself via anarchy? A transgressive, phantasmagorical autobiographical sketch that contains as much razzle-dazzle as it does sober self-actualization? A revisionist Western, an idiosyncratic, kinetic extrapolation of a Herman Melville novel, a near tone-poem sculpted from the textures of an urban environment, even a war-tinged romance turned fantasy pondering the afterlife—all of these have singular narratives presented in equally original ways, even if they occasionally allow one to spot allusions to other works. All That Jazz, for instance, might not have existed without the influence of Fellini’s 8 ½, though most viewers would likely find more differences than similarities between the two; casual ones might not even pick up on them at all.

Through the years, I’ve shifted stances between whether form or content carries more weight in determining a film’s greatness. In film school, after taking a class on Avant Garde cinema and another called “Ways of Seeing”, I edged towards valuing the shape of a film rather than its story (no matter how conventional or nonlinear.) I’d chalk that up to my exposure to many different ways of making a film over a short period of time. When asked by family or friends if I ever thought I’d direct any films of my own, my stock response was usually, “If I do, they’ll be experimental ones”; obviously, I perceived myself as somehow beneath becoming a more conventional filmmaker, not realizing how difficult it is to craft anything on either side of the commercial spectrum (at least in this time before anyone could make a movie with their smartphone.) 

Of course, while studying film, I was exposed to just as wide a variety of narratives as I were stylistic approaches. It’s easy to focus on the plot but also let it dictate how you feel about the imagery, sound, editing, production design, etc. For instance, I was so sickened by some of the content in Darren Aronofsky’s bold, numbing Hubert Selby Jr. adaptation Requiem For A Dream that I couldn’t appreciate its style one whit. In turn, the deliberately unpleasant way it often presented said content (my god, the unflattering lighting!) altered my perception of the material and may have influenced why I had such a negative reaction to it. For better and worse, form and content are equally crucial for a film to register and connect with me—as one should expect of all great art, it constitutes a delicate balance, a confluence of all of its parts coming together to somehow form a satisfying whole.

At one point in this project, I was going to include an entry on The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan’s 1997 adaptation of a Russell Banks novel about a remote community ravaged by the aftermath of a fatal school bus accident. Seen when it was first released during the holiday break between my first two semesters of film school, it had a substantial impact in how it played with time and perspective, its narrative generally nonlinear, certain information intentionally missing until strategically revealed as if sifting through puzzle pieces and attempting to piece them all together. It was the Toronto-based Egoyan’s seventh feature; I’d end up renting the previous six from various video stores over the next six months.

Perhaps I’ll will write more about The Sweet Hereafter one day (it’s far from the only title I considered for this project but ultimately passed over); I mention it here because of its central performance from then 18-year-old Sarah Polley, a Canadian child actress who had appeared in such projects as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, TV series Ramona (based on Beverly Cleary’s beloved children’s novels) and Road to Avonlea and Egoyan’s sixth feature Exotica. Nicole, her character in The Sweet Hereafter, however, was a turning point. With a naturalness and steel-eyed reserve, Polley had undeniable presence—magnetic without coming off as showy, thoughtful but not opaque. As the lone survivor of the crash, she’s thrust into a situation where she holds a rare power. As her backstory comes to light, she mesmerizes in how she wields such power while not letting us forget, heroine or anti-heroine, she’s still just a teenager, flaws and all.

The film raised Polley’s profile considerably outside her home country. Over the next few years she starred in a number of pictures from big Hollywood productions (Go, The Weight of Water, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of The Dead remake) to indieplex staples (Guinevere, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ) and smaller, more intimate pictures like My Life Without Me and Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing. During this period, Polley began writing and directing her own short films, which led to an impressive feature debut with 2006’s Away From Her, an Alice Munro adaptation that earned its star, Julie Christie an Academy Award nomination. Along with its follow-up Take This Waltz (2011), Polley suggested that her skills as a filmmaker were up there with her acting, approaching material with a tangible point of view and a nuanced understanding of human behavior.

One can apply the same attributes to her third feature and first documentary, 2012’s Stories We Tell. It’s a personal essay film about her family and although accurate, such a simplistic description doesn’t do it justice. At least on the surface, it’s a template for Polley to interview her father, Michael, her older siblings and stepsiblings and an extended network of people who all knew her mother, Diane, who died of cancer in 1990 when Sarah was eleven. She accompanies these interviews with silent home movie footage and Michael (himself an actor) reading his account of the family’s story; in doing so, she explores in-depth the various ways of telling a story, considering multiple points of view, the abundance or absence of found documentation, and how all that information is shaped into a narrative, bearing in mind what’s emphasized and also what’s left out.

Polley commences by asking her subjects variations of the following directive: “Tell me the whole story (of our family) as if I don’t know the whole story.” To pose this instruction is a neutral way of building a story drawing from various perspectives, to see what details reoccur in each person’s version of the story and, more significantly, which ones conflict and contrast with each other. From there, the viewer can piece together a throughline narrative: Diane (also a Toronto-based actor) met Michael in 1965. They married, had kids and both mostly left their chosen professions behind to raise their family. In 1978, craving a return to acting, Diane relocated to Montreal for a few weeks to be in a stage play (called Toronto (!)); not long after her return, she found out she was pregnant with Sarah. After Diane’s early death, child actress Sarah, significantly younger than her siblings would become even closer to her father.

It seems a fairly straightforward trajectory until one hears numerous people talk about how, leading up to her time in Montreal, Diane and Michael had grown apart—she was frustrated with having given up her career to become a housewife and not fully getting the love and attention she needed from him. However, it’s not the whole story. 45 minutes in, the viewer learns that before meeting Michael, Diane was previously married to another man. Two of Sarah’s four siblings are actually step-siblings from that marriage; one of them describes their birth father as “controlling”. Deeply unhappy, Diane leaves him for Michael and as a result, loses custody of her two children.

In the course of their interviews, multiple siblings and friends of the family remind Sarah that they used to tease her as a child because she didn’t much resemble her father, physically, stoking speculation that Diane might have slept with another man during her time in Montreal. After some detective work as an adult, Sarah discovers her biological father is actually Harry, a filmmaker Diane met while acting in Montreal. A DNA test proves it, enabling Sarah to forge a relationship with Harry while also figuring out how to break the news to the rest of the family, and in particular, Michael. Us knowing that Diane lost custody of her two eldest children also illuminates why she didn’t leave Michael and her two kids with him after meeting, falling for and becoming pregnant by Harry.

In unspooling this ever-more complex trajectory and keeping it afloat, Stories We Tell is a marvel of editing. Often, the film stitches together phrases from numerous interviewees with a swift fluidity where one could almost believe they came about as a mass conversation, like all the subjects were sitting together in the same room. Even if this were the case, however, it would sound more disjointed, like a Robert Altman film where words overlap due to the natural messiness of most conversations. Again, deciding what to include and where to put it is a conscious decision made by Sarah and her editor, Mike Munn. That it doesn’t come off as stilted but remains engrossing is the key to effective storytelling.

Regarding home movie footage of Diane and Michael, much of it is concentrated from their first few years together and the time immediately before and after Sarah’s birth; we also see scenes from Diane’s funeral and the years following it when young Sarah most closely bonded with Michael. They’re meant to accompany the story told by all the narrators and they often correspond neatly with what’s being said. It’s a seemingly excessive amount of footage and all reasonably convincing until, more than three-quarters of the way through, there’s some vintage footage of Diane and Michael where the camera tracks to the left to reveal a modern-day Sarah filming and directing them (as played by actors Rebecca Jenkins and Peter Evans.) At that moment, her voiceover notes, “I’m interested in the way we tell stories about our lives; the past is often ephemeral and hard to pin down.”

This late-in-the game reveal to exactly how Sarah’s been telling the story audaciously transforms the film. Suddenly, we’re encouraged to question whether any of the non-interview footage is real or a reenactment. Sarah’s initial correspondence and meetings with Harry, shot in the same fuzzy, silent, super-8 grain are surely the latter as are the Montreal rehearsal scenes of Toronto or the footage Diane’s funeral (who shoots home movies of those?), about which one sibling reminisces, “It was some kind of production; I felt like I was at a big play.”  The stuff of Michael as a young child or time he spent with Sarah after Diane’s death, however, are more likely the genuine articles. Then again, we now no longer know for sure, and here’s the thing—it doesn’t entirely matter. Even beyond the “home movies”, Sarah infuses the film with deliberate artifice, whether it’s still shots and scenes of her acting (in caveperson garb!) in the film Mr. Nobody at the time of her first contact with Harry, or footage from the 1964 Sophia Loren film Marriage, Italian Style whose plot about questionable paternity provides an analogue to this film’s narrative or, most notably, all the scenes of Sarah directing her father in a studio as he records his own written narration/side of the story (multiple times we see her ask him, “Dad, could you go back over that one line?”, looking for the best “take” of his performance.) As Michael notes earlier in the film, “It’s all done with mirrors, mate,” a seemingly tossed-off comment suddenly more resonant after the reveal.

Stories We Tell is the third film in this project that blurs fiction and non-fiction to a fine point. The other two, Close-Up and My Winnipeg arguably do so as narrative films exceedingly resembling documentaries to different ends: the former is a feature-length recreation of real-life events, while the latter is ostensibly a documentary suffused with fantastical elements to the point where the “My” in its title is crucial to understanding its idiosyncratic approach. Polley’s film is more explicitly a documentary in that it relays events that all purportedly happened, even if its subjects have varying accounts of such (for instance, Harry remembers attending Diane’s funeral, but Michael is nearly adamant that his wife’s lover was not there.) It’s no docu-fantasia such as My Winnipeg, but it does feature a slew of recreations that, like the events of Close-Up are presented as apparently factual (if in the end, unprovable.)

Films muddling this real/fake line fascinate me. After all, how can art connect if it doesn’t draw from some semblance of real-life experience? In my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I concluded that his art’s greatness depended on its inseparableness from his own life; such ambiguity has provided fodder for many films, from the deliberate, recontexualized performances in The Act of Killing and the more subtle, intentionally convincing ones of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets to a prankster delving deep into the meta-ness of constructing what may (or may not) be one resounding prank in the guise of an entire documentary in Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop. Reenactments often get a bad rap for their failure to convince or the level of artifice their mere presence suggests. Still, are they less pure than any other decisions Polley makes in telling this story? What’s left out or kept in or de-emphasized or brought to the fore can be just as calculating and indicative, documentary or not.

Midway through the film, Sarah recalls an argument with Harry where he wanted to write his own version of this story but she did not want him to publish it, hoping to give “equal weight to everyone’s version” (a lodestar for many documentarians.) Harry counters this by saying, “The crucial function of art is… to find out the truth of a situation.” Despite the facetiousness inherently unavoidable in any documentary (no matter how intentionally applied, like the “home movies”), to Sarah’s credit, Stories We Tell arrives at an unerring truth about the situation—one of its main participants, the long-deceased Diane, is unable to tell her version of this story. After Harry notes this, a montage follows of nearly all of the film’s interviewees one by one, each person silent, their faces consumed with grief, presumably thinking of Diane as a wistful, melancholic folk-pop song plays on the soundtrack. It’s deeply affecting for it reminds us not what the story is or necessarily how it was relayed, but why it was told.

Stories We Tell would end up Sarah’s last film for a decade as she struggled with a brain injury, eloquently outlined in her 2022 memoir Run Towards The Danger. She’d recuperate and make a triumphant return that year with Women Talking, an adaptation of a Miriam Toews novel that won her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It retains some of the thoughtfulness and innovation of her past work; hopefully, its success will enable Sarah to continuing making exactly the projects she wants to; preferably, they will look back to her third feature for a sense of inspiration and purpose.

Essay #20 of 24 Frames

Go back to #19: A Matter of Life and Death.