"The Tale" raises important questions about the psychological ramifications of child abuse, however weak storytelling ultimately turns the film into nothing more than an interesting failure.
It's the true story of the film maker trying to reconnect the dots of a childhood trauma after the discovery of her letters and a story from age 13 by her mother. First important point: memories of child abuse are repressed, memory doesn't oblige you to deal with more than you can handle. But that makes it difficult to assess not so much if the abuse happened, but how and why. And these are the questions the narrator / director tries to address. Second important point: she idolized the perpetrator(s) in her memory, giving them credit rather than condemning them, so memorizing the abuse goes along with dethroning her childhood icons. There are snippets of other survivors which indicate that this is a pattern, but because the film is principally about Fox's own story, it doesn't go beyond a brief observation.
Which takes me to the structural weakness of the film: The support characters. It would seem - and is, occasionally, quite clear - that the protagonist does not really interact with anyone. The mother, the lover, the FBI agent say all the right things - to the point that one wonders whether they are not just figments of her imagination. There is a strangely artificial sex scene in which the protagonist "rides" her lover wearing a sports bra, which feels so out of place that one cannot help but wonder whether it is only there to show that abuse doesn't affect sexual activity / control. When the protagonist confronts the perpetrator(s), it is sometimes made to look imaginary and sometimes real - which would be a great approach if there was some sort of resolution in the end. Films that better manage to move between reality and imagination would be, for instance, Laura Dern's own David Lynch collaboration "Inland Empire", or in respect to the subject matter "Images" by Robert Altman. If the borderline territory between imagination and reality is what Jennifer Fox intended to show, it would have been advisable to use (more) visual and narrative consultants.
Instead, there is an almost desperate attempt to be as realistic as possible, even going so far as to visualize sex between the adult and the child. Like the other sex scene, it feels forced, and doesn't really serve a narrative purpose. It seems to be there just for shock value, and that's one of the three big problems I have with this film. Another is that in one of the protagonist's imagined dialogues with the woman she idolized in her youth, she asks why she enabled her abuser, to which the woman replies: "No one saved me". In other words, she imagines that her idol was herself a victim - yet her real attempt at forcing an explanation out of her fails. That is very problematic because the main reason survivors don't talk about / address their experience is the fear of being labeled a potential abuser themselves. Fox probably intends to show that this is her own explanation, in the absence of any real one - which would explain the title "The Tale" as well - but she does other abuse survivors a huge disservice by perpetuating a stereotype. The truth is that while some survivors may indeed end up becoming abusers (thereby becoming visible to the public eye), the huge (invisible) majority is even more horrified by child abuse than the general public already is (and yes, this observation is based on personal experience). Problem number three is the final confrontation scene, which strongly recalls "Celebration" (1998) by Tomas Vinterberg. Anyone who knows that film will see the similarity, which then indicates that the confrontation in this film did not really happen. And if it didn't really take place, why is it there? If the climax of the film is imagined, then why not resolve the film by admitting it was? That would have delivered a much stronger message, because in real life, confronting the abuser rarely happens.
Jennifer Fox has been bold enough for a realistic psychological approach to this immensely difficult subject. It's incredibly hard to express what it feels like to deal with this, so any attempt deserves praise. But unfortunately she has marred her approach with leanings from other sources / other people's expectations, which makes the film less personal than it could have been, thereby diminishing its message and impact.
