Stories We Tell

Synopsis: Actor-turned-director Sarah Polley turns her camera’s gaze on her own life and examines the role of storytelling in the context of family myth, a mixture of fact and memory. Polley’s actress mother Diane, who died when Sarah was 11, is at the centre of a tale that shocks all the family members.

Sarah Polley has long been one of my favourite actors. The film I remember her in so vividly is My Life Without Me, before she stunningly took to the director’s chair with Take This Waltz and Away From Her. She always captures an emotional truth and depth in the characters she plays so it’s no surprise that here in her first documentary she draws wonderfully revealing emotions from her subjects, often with humour intertwined. But she also manages to weave her story in a way that lets it present itself as something of a mystery. Hence the Polley family secrets can only be found by going to see the film – you won’t hear them from me.

What Polley is really examining is the nature of both love and of memory, how each member of a family recalls certain things and believes absolutely that their particular memories are true. But each of Diane’s kids recall their mother in a different way whilst Sarah’s dad, Michael Polley, himself an actor, narrates some of the tale from a book he wrote years later in his life, trying to put together his recollections of his marriage with Diane and his time of bringing up little motherless Sarah, with whom he was deeply bonded. There are many interviews with close friends of Diane, and she seems universally remembered as a vibrant woman, who loved life, had little guile and few secrets, an image that will eventually be shattered

We even see grainy, colour-faded footage of Diane and Michael in the past, and I was initially fooled into thinking these were real home movies from the Polley past. But Polley has cleverly shot these sequences on Super 8 to give that impression and to evoke the sensibility of the type of old amateur family flicks many viewers will no doubt remember. Actors Rebecca Jenkins and Peter Evans respectively play Mum and Dad Polley in these scenes.

Meantime, we meet the real players as they are today, assembled by Polley in various recording venues where they are interviewed at length about their memories. This intertwining of present-day interviews and past footage seems to underscore the way so many of our memories work – an intermingling of many elements – emotion, fact, and especially fantasy, masquerading as memory. Sarah’s brothers and sisters feature, as well as a selection of actors with whom Diane had performed in theatre way back. Some of the leading men remember being highly smitten with dynamic Diane, most revealingly, Harry Gulkin, a snowy-haired but still charismatic man who is also recreated by actor Alex Hatzin in some of the fake Super 8 films.

Polley oversees the whole thing, but in a third layer another camera films her directing her “stars”. The result, which no doubt functions as a hugely cathartic session for the director, is multi-faceted, tender and thought-provoking all at the same time. However you see it, Stories We Tell is innovative film-making which should strike a deep chord with many viewers.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?