In her two dramatic features, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, young Canadian actor-director Sarah Polley showcased a mature sense of the complexities of love. In her exhilarating and brave new film, she turns a documentarian's lens on her own family to make a clear-eyed and compelling inquiry into her own origins, the unreliability of memory and the contestable nature of truth.
It's a gripping piece of work, at once formally audacious and disarmingly artless. More than once, Polley says (though not directly to us; she positions the audience as eavesdroppers on her process) that she is not sure why she is making the film and whether it will ever be seen.
But an offhand revelation in the final stanza as to the careful contrivance that has gone into the construction invites us to reconsider whether she herself has been an reliable witness. Perhaps the medium is the message and this is a film about a woman seizing control of a narrative in which she was always the most powerless figure.
Polley deftly shuffles the recollections of her siblings and half-siblings to tell what appears to be the story of her late mother, Diane, a vivacious and exuberant mother and actress who fell for a handsome Englishman she first saw on stage. That man, her father Mike, is a frequent interviewee and a narrator of sorts, reading a manuscript of uncertain authorship which gives the story its backbone.
Almost casually, the film uncovers a family secret that has been hidden in plain sight, but concern is less for the reveal than for the echoes it has had across the family through the years: new characters enter the frame, and wild geese get chased. To say more would spoil everything.
