Movie Review: The Tale (English)
Jennifer Fox's The Tale opens with a startling prologue: "The story you're about to see is true... as far as I know." Succintly foreshadowing what is to come next, not only is her debut film, about Fox's own experience with childhood sexual abuse and rape, extraordinary and disturbing, it's also about the stories we tell ourselves in order to go on about our lives, colouring, distorting and repressing our memories, living in denial and cloaking ourselves in the safety of a better narrative where everything is embellished and hunky-dory until one fine day, the tricks don't add up anymore, leaving us to cope up and deal with the trauma in ways that's painful, messy and devastating.
Jumping back and forth in time, just the way muddled memories play games on us, the unnervingly creepy cinematic memoir of sexual abuse finds the 48-year-old documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox (an excellent Laura Dern) scrambling to unpack her days as a 13-year-old teenager (Isabelle Nélisse) after her mother stumbles upon a story she had written back then, detailing her "beautiful" romantic relationship with a 40-year-old track coach (a squirm-inducing Jason Ritter), little knowing that he employs his charm to prey on other girls.
But it's not until she begins to give it a closer inspection that she realises, to her horror, the lies she has been telling herself, revealing the cracks beneath her narrative, even as she finally comes to grips with the fact that she was sexually abused and that she was a "victim". ("It really took until I was 45 years old to even call this child sexual abuse. Then, it was like, 'Oh my God, I want to investigate it. I want to make a film in order to help people learn and grow'," says Fox.) Which is also why, for an unflinching self-portrait of a movie, the confrontation scene with her abuser feels tacked on and as if it's slipped in from another film altogether. But stories like these, however unsettling they may be, need to be told for a reason: to give people the strength to seek their truths no matter how hard it is to digest, and to confront them and grow.
Jumping back and forth in time, just the way muddled memories play games on us, the unnervingly creepy cinematic memoir of sexual abuse finds the 48-year-old documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox (an excellent Laura Dern) scrambling to unpack her days as a 13-year-old teenager (Isabelle Nélisse) after her mother stumbles upon a story she had written back then, detailing her "beautiful" romantic relationship with a 40-year-old track coach (a squirm-inducing Jason Ritter), little knowing that he employs his charm to prey on other girls.But it's not until she begins to give it a closer inspection that she realises, to her horror, the lies she has been telling herself, revealing the cracks beneath her narrative, even as she finally comes to grips with the fact that she was sexually abused and that she was a "victim". ("It really took until I was 45 years old to even call this child sexual abuse. Then, it was like, 'Oh my God, I want to investigate it. I want to make a film in order to help people learn and grow'," says Fox.) Which is also why, for an unflinching self-portrait of a movie, the confrontation scene with her abuser feels tacked on and as if it's slipped in from another film altogether. But stories like these, however unsettling they may be, need to be told for a reason: to give people the strength to seek their truths no matter how hard it is to digest, and to confront them and grow.
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