Polley: Stories We Tell (2012)

At the beginning of Stories We Tell, there’s a reflection on stories that begin in the middle, working backwards and forwards at the same time. It’s a good way to think of this elusive documentary, which starts as a tribute to Sarah Polley’s mother, but quickly spirals out into a quest for her biological father, by way of her sprawling, eccentric, notoriously theatrical family. As might be expected, there’s a plethora of voices and opinions, but the great generosity of Polley’s vision is that she puts the story back in the mouth of the last person to be told – her father – while leaving it to him to determine how much of her own thoughts and feelings are left to the rest of the family to recount. Sorting out her kaleidoscopic reactions by way of the people who reflected or refracted them, she never engages in direct testimony herself, instead acting as a pressure point for everybody else’s recollections, as if to figure out how, exactly, she ever emerged from them. For that reason, the recollections feel quite free-floating at times, as Polley places them against a more or less continuous montage of home videos and re-enactments. Visually, these grainy tableaux comprise most of the footage, and yet they never feel like anything more than background music, placeholders for a fully-realised film that never quite comes to fruition, never quite emerges from the loose, provisional scaffold that Polley improvises with each new disclosure, revelation or speculation. In fact, after her immaculate filmography – her immaculate presence in all that she does – it’s quite disarming to see her erect such a makeshift, temporary structure. Yet that contrast is perhaps also what makes Stories so artlessly immediate, so intriguingly, tantalisingly inconclusive, like a self-portrait sketched out by someone who is too private or elusive even for self-portraits. As in the most evocative home videos, you’re never really offered more than a mere glimpse of a life that has been curated and collated more or less contingently, just as Polley seems to capture the most inadvertent and spontaneous moments from her family with the tact and sensitivity of a younger sibling who’s spent her whole life watching them. And the great pathos of Stories is that Polley’s uncertain parentage only reinforces her privileged, precious position as the youngest child - or turns her back into the youngest child, reaching out to her parents, stepparents and siblings with an exquisite vulnerability, a first tremulous step back into the adult world.