A woman named Diana was the first Canadian woman to lose custody of her children due to infidelity. She was married to a man who was very wealthy and, by some accounts, very controlling. She had two children she loved, but she also wanted to pursue her dreams of acting--which she gave up when she married young.
She was described as a loud, funny, warm person who exuded a sense of joy, attracting people "like moths to a flame." According to her children, friends, and husband, she had a contagious personality and people loved her.
Her divorce from her first husband made front page news in Canada:
She has allowed her desire for a career to overtop her domestic duties. She is unrepentant. Her association with her lover is physical.
This sounds like it could have been written in the 19th century, but this was 1967, the same year in which I married.
She then married Michael Polley-though they couldn't have been more different. Diana was the quintessential extrovert, Michael the brilliant introvert. (One of her children compared her to Lucille Ball.)
When Diana was offered a part in a play, she left Michael and her children for a few weeks, during which time she had a love affair. When she returned home, she discovered she was pregnant--though since Michael had also visited her once, she thought the baby could possibly be his. She kept this secret from her husband all her life, then she died when the baby girl, Sarah, was eleven.
Her close friends knew the truth--as Diana had a habit of telling her friends everything. Michael didn't know for three decades. In her twenties, Sarah sets out to learn the truth.
But what is truth?
And how does one find "the" truth when there are so many different versions of it?
Sarah Polley explores these questions in her documentary: Stories We Tell. The five brothers and sisters answer questions and share their memories of their late-mother, Diana. Her husband Michael, the lover who is Sarah's biological father, and Diana's many friends--all are interviewed. The film is a patchwork of different details and versions.
"All these years, Diana wanted me to write," Michael said. "She thought I was a brilliant writer, but I never devoted the time to do it. But now! Now that I know the truth, I have something to write about and intense energy for writing it. I have a whole new lease on life." (A loose paraphrase.)
I recommend this film; it's the second time I've watched it. Here are the opening lines, by Sarah's father, Michael Polley--who is, we now know, not her biological father.
When you're in the middle of a story,
it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion,
a dark roaring,
a blindness,
a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood,
like a house in a whirlwind,
or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids,
and all aboard are powerless to stop it.
It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story,
when you're telling it to yourself or someone else."
No comments:
Post a Comment