I believe that confronting, or even coming face to face,
with a work of art is an act of surrender. You have to let it affect you. You
have to be vulnerable. When I look back, I realize that is what makes me love the
books, movies and music I love.
I am writing this in one such moment of weakness. I just got
done watching Sarah Polley’s documentary, ‘Stories We Tell.’ The title gives
little of the plot away but in retrospect, it reveals the metaphor of the film.
In this film, she attempts to uncover an important truth about
herself, the truth of who her father is. In doing so, she also discovers much
about who her mother truly was. It is not an easy truth to unravel because of
the number of narratives that need to be pieced together. The story finally
takes shape through the accounts of many people, which includes her
siblings, her mother’s husband, her biological father, her mother’s friends and
a few fringe characters.
It is unusual that a story so intimate and personal to one
person should move me - an unrelated viewer in another part of the world - so much.
But it did. It suddenly brought home the fact that there is very little relevance or truth
to what we think is the truth. Whose truth is more important than the other’s?
That of Sarah’s biological father, who is convinced that her
mother and he are the only people who can authoritatively tell the story?
That of the man Sarah knew as her father for much of her life, to
whom this revelation is utterly meaningless for there is no way she would stop
being his daughter and for there is nothing that would make his love for his
late wife diminish?
As Sarah’s sister puts it succinctly, “I don’t think there ever
was a ‘what actually happened’.”
As the movie nears its end, the viewer gets to the same realization
that the filmmaker does –that no story can be told without fictionalizing it, often
unconsciously. That the ‘search for the vagaries of truth and the unreliability
of memory’ is futile.
More than Sarah’s personal quest to uncover her parentage
or the person her mother was beyond her social persona, the film asks us all a few
simple questions -
If you were asked to tell the whole story of your life, what
would it be? How much of it would be tainted by your inability to make sense out
of things and events? How much of the blanks would you fill with what you think
it should have been?
*******
“When you are in the
middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark
roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a
house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the
rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it
becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or
to someone else.”
- -
Margaret
Atwood
