‘Women Talking’: The Unbearable Lightness of Freedom

This time last week I finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from the recently departed Milan Kundera. While it’s embarrassing to admit to only just getting round to reading it, in a coincidence that I’m sure people of a religious persuasion would describe as an instance of divine providence, it has proven to be fortunate timing for a moment of intertextuality. A few days later, I happened to watch Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (a much less significant oversight in regards to the time passed, but a damning one nonetheless). I was surprised to hear, during the short narrative segment that opens the film - as delivered by the character of Autje (portrayed by Kate Hallett) - some ideas that directly evoked the central theme of Kundera’s novel: the titular concept of “unbearable lightness”.

In the opening few chapters of the book, Kundera philosophises (and boy does he like to philosophise) on the nature of eternal recurrence. He discusses the conventional wisdom, purveyed by Nietzsche amongst others, that humanity’s heaviest burden is the almost infinite recurrence and reoccurrence of every little thing that happens in our lives. This leads to a concept that is so familiar to us today as to appear unquestionable: the likening of psychological burdens to a physical heaviness; the notion that we are tangibly weighed down by our mental challenges. Kundera totally rejects this idea through his central character Tomas, who believes that it is not the heaviness, but rather the weightlessness of life, and the decisions that categorise it, that makes it more difficult to bear. He writes:

‘There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? […] Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.’

In other words, how can we find meaning in our lives in the absence of any means of comparison? We have no previous life against which to balance our decisions, nor can we experience the lives of others. When we make a decision, we can only hope that it was the right one, and that it was done at the right time, and we’ll never truly know whether it was beneficial or detrimental to us in the long run. These key events in our life, which should form the basis of how we derive a greater meaning, are thus replaced by an unbearable weightlessness: what happens but once might as well not have happened at all.

Now compare this to the opening monologue from Women Talking, in which Autje summarises the impact of the years of sexual abuse, and subsequent gaslighting to shift blame, perpetrated by male members of her Mennonite commune against its women:

‘It went on for years. To all of us. It felt like weightlessness. It felt like drifting over what used to be real. It felt like a banishment, as though we had no invitation anymore to be a part of the real. I used to wonder who I would be if it hadn’t happened to me. I used to miss the person I might have been. I don’t anymore. Because it’s doomsday, and a call to prayer. It’s both.’

The physical and psychological torture that these abusers perpetrated on the vulnerable women that were beholden to them as part of their religious creed did not result in a feeling of encumbrance, but of an unbearable weightlessness. What haunts these women the most is the fact that the meaning that they had derived from their way of life and from their religion (‘what used to be real’) has been taken away from them. In its place is a lightness: a lack of personhood, in the way that they had always come to understand it.

This monologue is impeccably written, because it perfectly captures the state of mind that unites the women of the commune - even when they are divided in other matters - and will thematically guide the events of the film through to its conclusion. As the monologue closes, Autje hints at the core event that guides the plot - the abuse has been uncovered, the perpetrators have been rounded up by the police to be held in a jail cell ‘for their own safety’, the rest of the men are on their way to town to post bail, and the women of the commune now have two days to decide how to act. Do they carry on as if nothing ever happened? Do they stay in the commune and fight for their right to live on their own terms, free from molestation, coercion and manipulation? Or do they leave without a trace to start a new life elsewhere? This is their ‘doomsday, and a call to prayer’: simultaneously the day of their liberation and of their downfall - leaving the colony will result in their excommunication and therefore their eternal banishment from the kingdom of heaven. As decisions go, it is hard to imagine one with more weight. As Kundera would describe it:

‘The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. […] The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.’

Whilst the years of systematic abuse has left these women feeling weightless, the fleeting moment of their liberation is one of the heaviest burdens they will ever have to bear. This is the central conceit of the film - how will these women react when subjected to the crushing weight of delivering their own freedom? Following a town-wide vote, it is decided that “doing nothing” is not an option, they must act. The women of the colony’s core families assemble to decide their fate. All of them want to end the abuse. All of them have lost their sense of the ‘real’. But, at least initially, the act of leaving is a burden that few of the women can stand to bear. Their reactions vary. For some, most notably Janz (Frances McDormand), the burden proves too much and they elect to bury their head in the sand and take no action. Some, such as Mariche (Jessie Buckley), want to stay and learn to forgive, so that they might preserve their place in heaven. Others, like Salome (Claire Foy) are hell bent on revenge, intent on staying - not to forgive - but to fight for an equal standing within their society. I won’t reveal the outcome of their discussions - the film is well worth a watch in order to find that out - but taking on the burden of liberation will bring these women closer to the earth and, after all, though the heavens are the domain of the Lord, the earth He has given to us. No undertaking could be holier, more real, and more truthful.

Image credits: michaella92, MovieStillsDB. Copyright: Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 2022.