Certain Women – Sydney Film Festival
Kelly Reichardt’s beautifully understated feature, Certain Women, opens with a train quietly drudging across Montana’s bucolic terrain. If this tale were a Western, we would half expect a game-changing figure to emerge from the train; returning from a stint in jail or the war to retrieve the fragments of a life left behind. But Reichardt is merely casting anchor, her triptych is no Western, and her solitary female protagonists seem to have never left the constellation of quiet, sparsely-populated towns that pepper the American North-west.
Adapted from Montana author Maile Meloy’s short stories, Tome, Native Sandstone and Travis B., Certain Women is firmly fixed to its mooring on the vast continent while Montana seems to exist out of time, with its static women bound to its periphery.
In the first tale, lawyer Laura (Laura Dern), is fast losing sympathy with Fuller, a persistent client who refuses to accept that his legal options are exhausted and the system has failed him. When Laura refers him to an out-of-town, male lawyer who parses the same fate, reality finally settles in and Fuller opts for a perceptibly extreme but – in truth – banal response.
In the second tale, the re-appearance of an actor from the first hints at unspoken marital tensions between Gina (Michelle Williams) and her husband, Ryan (James LeGros). Gina has her heart set on building a cottage in the country solely from re-purposed, native materials, and approaches an aged neighbour, Albert (René Auberjonois), to sell her the sandstone that lies in the rubble of an old school house on his property.
Content living with the ghosts in his backyard, Albert’s hesitancy (and perhaps his latent misogyny) is revealed in the cool way he diffuses and defers Gina’s inquiries. Just as Albert and Gina seem to be engaged in different conversations, a ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) has her reliably routinised life disrupted when she strikes up a misguided friendship with recent law-graduate Beth (Kristen Stewart). After travelling four hours from home to teach an educational law class at the local school, Beth simply appreciates having someone to complain to after class, but for the Rancher, this is the only real connection she has to another human being.
While Reichardt’s characters are shown to inhabit the same space-time coordinates, there are no forced links between them. The women operate on vastly different planes, but a common thread unites them: their struggle to make meaningful connections with the people in their orbit. In this seemingly endless landscape, the characters are often confined to small spaces that force relation, but lack connection.
Terse and even harrowing interactions transpire in the confines of cars, cheap hotel rooms, small offices and dining booths. In the last tale, the disconnect between Beth and the Rancher impresses itself most greatly when they’re at their closest physical proximity, on a brief and unexpected horse ride.
While the first two stories close on some small graces or reconciliations, the story of the Rancher seems to be Reichardt’s thesis at its most distilled. These are all small breaths in the sweep of their lives, but the Rancher suffers from the least gratifying conclusion – when human connection seems so out of reach, the smallest spark can ignite the most destructive flame.
Certain Women is screening as part of Sydney Film Festival.
