As 13-year-old Jenny gets sucked into the charismatic personalities of Mrs. G and Bill, we the audience can see that they are predators in the process of grooming her. "The Tale" is an unblinking portrait of how grooming works. The tiny boundary-breaches. The testing of the waters. The subtle wedge Mrs. G and Bill put between Jenny and her parents ("Your parents are afraid of becoming free," Bill tells the child). The creation of a conspiratorial "let's tell each other secrets" atmosphere. It's chilling. A body double was used for the sexual scenes (and it's obvious it's a body double, a good choice: it distances us enough so we don't worry about the child actress).
Catharsis and confrontation is not what "The Tale" is about (which is why the main confrontation feels like it's slipped in from another movie altogether). "The Tale" is also not about mother-daughter conflict along the lines of "Why didn't you protect me?" On the contrary: Jennifer truly believes she remembers that summer accurately. When her mother yells, "Why are you not angry?" Jennifer doesn't have an answer. (Fox has said she didn't classify what happened to her as "sexual abuse" until she was 45 years old. It sometimes takes that long.) All of the actors are in a beautiful zone here, including the young Nélisse, whose solemn face takes in the lit-from-within figures of Mrs. G and Bill and it's clear she feels anointed, chosen, by these two glamorous adults with burnished skin, intimate eyes, languid body language weaving a hypnotic spell.
In The Expelled, Samuel Beckett writes, "Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little." Dern plays a woman who, on a level so deep it's out of reach, cannot "think of certain things." Jennifer is not an avenging angel. She's a confused woman trying to remember. "What do you remember of that summer?" "What did you think, Mom, when Bill picked me up at the door?" "Who is that in the picture? Why don't I remember her?" Because Jennifer has never seen herself as a "victim," because she resists the term altogether, it's difficult for her to even look at other possibilities.
The final moment of "The Tale" is devastating and also ambivalent. It shows what has been lost, but it also shows what has been gained.
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