The Magdalene Sisters
Peter Bradshaw
Friday February 21, 2003
The Guardian,
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,4267,899351,00.html This extraordinary film is celluloid incendiarism, rabble-rousing cinema with a delirious, delicious edge of black comedy which I estimate to be about 90-95% intentional. Director Peter Mullan's debut feature Orphans had the same explosive seriocomic combination. Then, as now, he's putting out the fire of emotional pain with the gasoline of satire and scorn.
The Magdalene Laundries were institutions sponsored and maintained by the Catholic Church in Ireland for the incarceration of young women thought to be a moral danger to themselves and others - unmarried mothers or simply girls who were considered hussies and whores, no better than they should be. With the legal consent of their fathers, they were imprisoned and made to work for no pay in imitation of Mary Magdalene in laundries, always exploited and in many cases sexually abused. The laundries existed until the 1970s, but the very last did not close until 1996. Mullan's gut-wrenching film tells the story of three Dublin women in 1964, fictional composites of what appear to be real cases - an ethically tricky narrative procedure to which I shall return in a moment.
Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) makes a complaint against a boy who raped her at a wedding reception; she is immediately the one treated like a criminal. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has given birth out of wedlock to her family's horrified shame. And the only crime of Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is to be a spirited, beautiful young woman who flirts with the boys. They become neophytes in the unhappy order of the Magdalene Sisters, whose names are presented in stark black-and-white over the opening and closing credits, like the Washington Vietnam Memorial. Margaret, Rose and Bernadette are entrusted to the untender mercies of Sister Bridget, a simply glorious performance from Geraldine McEwan, the glitteringly cruel and cantankerous empress of emotional sadism.
Try to imagine a composite of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Angela's Ashes with a touch of Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls or one of those girls school stories with which Philip Larkin used to amuse himself. There is real emotional outrage here, and Peter Mullan thankfully nowhere feels himself constrained by delicacy, hushed respect or genteel good taste. It is a sustained and all-but-deafening howl of rage on behalf of vulnerable women whose story is only just beginning to be told - recently in Elizabeth Mickery's BBC drama Sinners, which also had Anne-Marie Duff in the cast. Mullan has the directorial power and stamina of a bareknuckle fighter coming out of his corner for round after round, landing crunching bodyblows. This is tough, angry, muscular film-making - it has a kind of 120-degree proof passion which makes most other Irish and British cinema look tame and lame.
But there's something else here too: a compulsive and slightly gamey Theatre of Cruelty which sometimes does not obviously occupy the moral high ground. The Sisters are always getting beaten. Mullan himself has a ferocious cameo as a father who drags his errant daughter into the Laundry and gives her a good hiding with his belt, while Sister Bridget looks on - Christian charity perceptible only in the fact that he spares her the buckle end. Two girls get their bare legs whipped with a cane by Sister Bridget who, on another occasion, switches to the strap to give Rose a merciless thrashing which is interrupted by the news that an elderly inmate has died. "May God have mercy on her soul," says Bridget, shifting gear smoothly into cooing piety - a superb moment, at once comic and chilling. They are all ceaselessly humiliated, made in one scene to parade naked for the gigglingly cruel nuns who decide who has the biggest breasts and hairiest private parts - and Mullan does not scruple to show them all in full frontal so we can assess the accuracy of these verdicts. It may be questionable, but it certainly shows the warped and thwarted sexualisation of this institutional cruelty.
Perhaps the most incredible scene is when Margaret exacts her revenge on a priest for abusing another inmate, Crispina (Eileen Walsh); she puts nettles in his laundry and watches as the man wrenches off his vestments in the middle of communion in agony, skin aflame. But the broad comedy is inflected with horror. Crispina screams at him: "You are not a man of God!" over and over again while the rest of the congregation is paralysed with dismay. She says this phrase long after another director would have cut - Mullan holds on, taking it from the realm of realism into hallucination and nightmare. It is inspired judgment and nerve.
There are some irritating lapses of honesty. Over the closing credits, Mullan invents a potted "what-happened-to" story for each character, implying that they are in themselves real. The last I saw this flagrant invention was at the end of the similarly fictionalised Bosnian war drama Behind Enemy Lines. Also, Mullan invents a highly unlikely "escape" scenario for his attractive leads; the BBC version was much more plausible and pessimistic about escape bids.
Ever since Mullan won the Golden Lion at Venice last year with this film, the Vatican has obligingly been furious, sniping at it for being sensational anti-clericalism; anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the educated left, they say, and the movie will play to middlebrow secular prejudice. But it would be massively obtuse not to acknowledge the grotesque and terrible injustice the Magdalene Laundries represented, and what a blazingly and compellingly powerful indictment this film is. Mullan has got fine, honest performances from his cast, and McEwan deserves every award going: it's a scandal that she hasn't been recognised by the Bafta voters. The rest of us can vote with our feet - and go and see this film.
Try to imagine a composite of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Angela's Ashes with a touch of Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls or one of those girls school stories How about "girl interupted".
of course, nowadays we allow delinquent girls to screw the entire football team, have five abortions, take drugs, and live free away from mom on welfare...we have a million street kids who ran away from home who turn to prostitution. We're soooo much more compassionate about teens....
excuse me, but I wonder how many of these stories are exaggerated? or isolated incidents that are made to seem as if they were "normal"...
After all, these institutions were not "for life" but temporary asylums for girls in trouble. If these institutions are presented as a compassionate alternative, then maybe we'd re open some as an alternative to abortion...whoops can't have that...nor can we show their children who grew up happily in loving adopted families...