HBO is, for some unknown reason, not really promoting The Tale, which generated so much buzz at Sundance even people who weren’t there – like me – could feel it. At any rate, it really should be seen, promotion or no. I reviewed The Tale for Ebert.
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This seems like it’s going to be very difficult to watch, but I’ve felt the need to see it ever since I heard about the actor switch for 13 year old Jennifer. It’s such an interesting way — both elegant and jarring — to show how unreliable memory is, and to address how much older and more mature you feel at that age than you really are.
I read an interview with the director where she said that she thought her thirteen year old self “protected” her from the trauma and pain she might have otherwise felt; that she almost felt grateful for it, because something that could have landed her in a mental hospital didn’t take her down and she went on to have this exciting great life instead. And I think that kind of compartmentalization is so much more common than anyone wants to acknowledge. People expect that every victim will react the same way to sexual trauma and they just don’t. Some people don’t even feel traumatized. Until, maybe, they’re read to experience that, to acknowledge that a beautiful memory was something very ugly.