Stories We Tell

Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley's quasi-documentary Stories We Tell raises questions about narrative truth while recounting a poignant family saga. The film initially appears to be about Polley's mother Diane—an actress who died in 1990 when the filmmaker was 11—intertwining home movie footage with interviews of Polley's father, Michael, and her siblings John, Mark, Susy and Joanna, as well as other relatives and friends. But there's something peculiar from the start, since Michael's remarks are divided between those he delivers extemporaneously seated at a kitchen table and others that are recorded in a studio from a prepared text. The story takes an even stranger turn when Polley interviews actor Geoff Bowes regarding persistent rumors that he, not Michael, is her biological father. Polley takes up the subject again with producer Harry Gulkin, which ultimately leads to revelations that are shocking to both Polley and the audience. Stories We Tell ignores the usual conventions of being an objective documentary (some footage consists of newly-filmed sequences posing as archival material), but it's not really just a personal essay either. Ultimately, although ostensibly about Diane, the film winds up being more about the interviewees and Polley herself, becoming a hall of mirrors in which the images reflect on one another in distorted, fragmented form, a biographical tale in which the subject is not so much a single person as the nature of storytelling itself. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)