On “Women Talking” (from currently running stack on movies by and about women.)

“As odd as the form of the women’s talk often was, taking place among highly religious women so sheltered from the world, it had a structure and essence I remember well from the early days of Women’s Lib. For want of a better term, I’ll call it “coming into consciousness”—with all that is entailed by that: the sense of waking up to disturbing yet potentially liberating truths, the wrangling over how to “theorize” it all, the moments when that wrangling turns to holding and comforting, the recognition that one can love and also need to leave. There’s a lot of arguing among the women in that barn—we spent a lot of time at that too--but despite the women’s differences of opinion as to what to do, despite their petty excursions into irrelevant disputes, despite their very different personalities, ages, abilities and disabilities, they are deeply, intimately bound together—and those bonds are what allows them, eventually, to leave.”