Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell (2013, MC-90, NFX) confirms Sarah Polley as one of the directors (and actresses) whose next film I am most eager to see.  Away from Her was my favorite film of 2007, and last year’s Take This Waltz well worth seeing twice.  Of films in which she acts but does not write or direct, I recommend the little-known Guinevere and The Secret Life of Words. Her latest is classified as a documentary, and certainly qualifies under Grierson’s seminal definition of the genre, “creative treatment of actuality,” but the film is thoroughly designed and not merely recorded.  Polley delves into her own family history, in a way that recalls Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies.  I won’t say much more, because the less you know going in, the greater the surprise of the film’s unfolding.  I’ll only say that it is simultaneously clever and heartfelt, and highly multivalent, with a profound understanding of our need to make meaningful stories out of our own lives, and to perform them.  Through home movies, interviews, and other means, Polley recounts the history of the mother she lost at the age of 11, and the mysteries of her own birth.  Hers is an absorbing family of performers, and they play out their stories in engrossing fashion.  Stories We Tell will certainly rank with the very best films of this year in any genre.