Conformable with her documentary root, American filmmaker Jennifer Fox's first feature film is incredibly based on her own life, THE TALE is a tendentious case of child sexual abuse, and the victim is a 13-year-old Fox herself, played by a pyrotechnic duo (Dern as the adult in the present, and Nélisse, as her impressionable younger self).
For starter, the film's insightful optics of “truth itself” smack throw audience for a loop ten minutes into the story, as the adult Fox, whose buried memories about that particular past start to re-surface in the wake of her essay, written when she was 13, is discovered by her fazed and accusatory mother Nettie (Burstyn). In her own recollection, she imagines herself two years older, taller, almost grown-up, but the fact is that she was only 13, quiet, precocious, petite but irrefutably prepubescent, that is the first clue of Fox's own defective coping mechanism of the trauma.
She beautifies the past, by subconsciously hiding the inappropriateness of her age, it reveals a deeper scar which belies the fact that she is full aware of what happened is wrong, but to justify it, she reimagines herself as a heroine, chillingly pronounced through Nélisse's uncanny audacity, that she is anything but a victim in her own story, this is how she can live with that sinking feeling, to cover it with a normalized version, it was a love affair, he is 40, she is 13, but she is not harmed, but loved by him, and eventually she calls off the relationship and it is his heart that she breaks.
Not only THE TALE buckles down to din into its audience to apprehend with the self-denial from a victim's angle, but more intrepidly and discerningly, it doesn't shy away from laying bare a perpetrator's grooming strategy, often to rather explicit extent (with body double duly arranged for the effect), if that cannot elicit in one the mortal fear of pedophilia, what else can?
By comparison, on wrestling with the “I am fine” facade and its slow disintegration, THE TALE is less impactful, perhaps in line with her true-to-herself principle, as she is not a damaged good, troubled but as an independent filmmaker , she leads a healthy and successful life. Fox only shows the damage obliquely, bickering with her awfully nice fiancé Martin (Common) is a light one, and the deal with her marriage-and-child-less status might not be a big deal in today's ethos. Thus, the importance of meeting her own demon face to face is less therapeutic on paper, and legally the malefactor remains unpunished, but in the movie, thanks to Dern's ballsy flourish and Fox's adroitness in camera language, the final shots work strikingly on an emotional level, the plug is finally pulled from her year-long self-inflicted mental hypnosis.
Much of the technique adheres to Fox's cinéma-vérité idiom, visually THE TALE feels unadorned and lifelike, Fox also makes great use of faux-interviews to burrow deeper into the rub, begging confession or unregenerate repute.
Apart from Dern, whose late career soaring is unstoppable as she strides ever so unrestrained and unfettered in inhabiting her characters, Jason Ritter is tasked with obviously, the most unsavory role, and he manages to be eloquent and superficially benevolent without baring a heinous grin. But the real class act is a young Nélisse, procures a child's frankness that runs so ingrainedly athwart to the seedy business the film explores, yet in other instances, her precociousness bulks large as if she is possessed with a much older soul, let's wait and see how her career pans out; lastly, Debicki, plays the younger version of a pedophile's accessory (Frances Conroy is wrongly cast as her older version, but on earth, which actress can excel in that role?), is another godsend, ethereal and chain-smoking, her Mrs. G is enigmatic, superior,radiant but also gelid, unfeeling and a victim-turned-victimizer, adding that particularly requisite masterstroke of ambiguity in this prestige “message” movie, a dark hole no parent should overlook.
referential entries: Thomas Vinterberg's THE HUNT (2012, 8.3/10); Sandi Tan's SHIRKERS (2018, 7.4/10).
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