Stories We Tell

Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley’s new feature, The Stories We Tell, is as slippery as an eel. It claims to be a documentary, but then so did Spinal Tap. The film’s chief theme is the elusiveness of memory and the true unknowingness of the human heart. It’s chief subject: Polley’s effervescent mother Diane, her life, dreams and her secrets.

Early in the film, Polley’s dad and Secrets We Tell’s narrator, Michael, takes a seat in a sound booth ready to record his voiceover and notices the cameras fixed on him. “This isn't how this is usually done, is it?” he says to his daughter. Sharp man, that Michael, as he’s co-starring in a delicious deconstruction of the documentary form. Polley takes the staples of the genre – talking heads, archive footage – and twists them to her own means (keep a keen eye on the Super 8 home movies Polley intertwines into the narrative – don’t assume their grainy, blown-out look and bang-on period detail equate to authenticity). The brilliance of Polley’s film is that its formal trickery doesn’t dampen its emotional heft. Wrapped inside this enigma is a touching love letter from a daughter to her mother, a live-wire actor whose light shone bright, but for too short a time.