Sarah Polley’s “STORIES WE TELL”
Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald
Sarah Polley’s STORIES WE TELL is an exploration of how truth and memory interact in subtle and subjective ways about one family’s past history.
Being an outsider to this family it is difficult to assess what is truth and what is fiction given that the movie incorporates so many reenacted sequences made to look like they were really filmed in the past.
At any given time we have multiple levels of subjectivity:
How the director is orchestrating the film’s stories and storytellers.
How individual scenes from the past are being re-enacted.
How individual interviewed storytellers are remembering or choosing what they wish to say or not say.
At the end of the film I found myself wondering what if anything I had just seen was objectively “true.” For example, does this family really exist or is it a figment of someone’s imagination?
Being so far removed from the events depicted here it’s hard for me to answer such questions with certainty. But STORIES WE TELL is a fascinating, original, and very entertaining adult film
Review copyright (c) 2014 by Dennis D. McDonald
