ABSTRACT
There are two pretty nasty women in Stories We Tell (2012) – the mother and the daughter. This is a pretty bold statement and I will qualify it directly but the fact is both the mother and the daughter in the film are certainly not very nice, at least within the framework of patriarchal and conservative thinking: the mother appears to have been pretty promiscuous all her life, resulting in abandoning of her first family and children and then in being unfaithful yet again in her second marriage to the point of getting pregnant by another man, without ever sorting out her personal circumstances, thus deceiving her husband, her daughter and the whole family as to the provenance of her child. It is perhaps too much to call Diana a neo femme fatale but some of the femme fatalish elements are in place in her character for sure: she is pretty, she uses men to her own advantage, she uses her sexuality – and sadly, like a classic femme fatale, she dies, exiting the patriarchal stage, not strong enough to carry out the fight – like in many noir movies.
