On demand: "The Tale"

2018's The Tale proved a key text of the #MeToo moment: a Sundance-showcased HBO pick-up, with Laura Dern (and her never busier eyes) cast as her own director Jennifer Fox, a fortysomething documentarist thrown into a tailspin upon the rediscovery of an essay she wrote as a teenager describing her experiences at riding school. In its subject matter, it's not so far removed from the TVMs of yore: some form of injustice or abuse, a middle-aged heroine at the centre, some push for clarity and catharsis. What's new is the postmodern framing, which insists that clarity and catharsis can be difficult to achieve outside of a two-hour movie. Instead of procedural surety and security - a push in a specific direction towards carefully defined aims and goals - we observe Dern's Jennifer as she comes to interrogate her memories, trying to ascertain that what she now believes may have happened actually did happen. (She's a documentarist hunting the sources who might corroborate her own story.) By way of a primer, Fox stages flashbacks to camp life, where young Jenny (Isabelle Nélisse) hovers between her upright Englishwoman instructor (Elizabeth Debicki) and the latter's jockish partner (Jason Ritter); yet as we wait for the parade-ground discipline to warp or sour, we also get scenes in which Dern-as-Jennifer teaches (source of the film's most didactic writing, underlining one subtext: what have we learnt here?), potters around the family home under the concerned eye of ma Ellen Burstyn, backs away from pre-existing wedding plans made with hunky cameraman beau Common, and gradually applies an adult eye to events she didn't - or couldn't - understand as a child. For Fox, clearly, The Tale serves as a continuation of the haphazard, often plain messy process her younger self began when she wrote that story.

Like its telemovie predecessors, it doesn't look like much: the flashbacks have a sundappled period handsomeness, but more could have been done with the image to suggest an uncertain memory, and many of these scenes look as if they've been chopped to their core so the film could still occupy that two-hour timeslot. (A private investigator appears out of nowhere and disappears into nothing, deemed surplus to narrative requirements.) Yet the choices Fox makes within those frames frequently prove inspired indeed. The whole film is premised on the sophisticated irony that a non-fiction filmmaker should have felt compelled to move into fiction to bring herself closer to reality. Yet fiction permits Fox her most strikingly imaginative flourishes - to exert a greater control over how her story is interpreted. Take Debicki's height, for starters, here weaponised to convey something of how the instructor has grown in Jenny's imagination. (By way of stark contrast, the instructor's latter-day incarnation is Frances Conroy, the stooped mom from Six Feet Under.) And Dern's insistently bra-on sex scenes - almost parodically televisual, not to mention very un-HBO - make sense once we find out what happened to the character at a formative age.

Suffice to say, the adult material - when we get to it - goes some measure beyond the realm of the Channel 5 afternoon movie, not just in its language (phrases seared on the mind like cigarette burns), but its psychological complexity. The abuse here appears as much a result of what went on under Jenny's own roof (turning her younger self against anything so heteronormative as marriage) as what happens under her abuser's eye. That complexity is further borne out in Dern's central performance, at once fraught and lived-in, sketching not a stock movie victim or crusader, but a woman reshaped by her experiences and pointed toward various forms of self-sabotage. (Untangling her story involves untangling herself.) Despite the acclaim and awards, Fox hasn't made another movie since, which inevitably prompts speculation: perhaps this one exhausted her, perhaps she simply has no interest in directing again, perhaps the powers-that-be are scared of what other abuses she might think to put on screen. Yet last year, she told The New York Times the identity of her abuser, who had died two years before - and once you understand The Tale was filmed while Fox's (prominent) abuser was still alive, the film's flaws seem forgivable and its achievements become all the more impressive. This is the work of someone using a commercial framework to fumble towards an uncomfortable personal truth - and to make fuller (if not complete) sense of events no-one should have to endure.

The Tale is currently streaming via NOW TV, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.