‘Magdalene Sisters’ a must see
Published 8:33 am Thursday, February 28, 2008
“The Magdalene Sisters” is a film that likely won’t make it to suburban movie theaters this fall, but should. If you have a chance to make the trek south into Seattle, I recommend seeking out this devastating and controversial film.
We like to think that slavery was abolished in the 19th century in “civilized” countries like Ireland. But in the 20th century, some 30,000 Irish Catholic women were sent to the church run Magdalene Laundries to do penance for their perceived sins — often spending their entire lives imprisoned behind the walls of these asylums. These women never convicted of any crime; instead, rape and incest victims, unwed mothers and girls who were just “too pretty” were consigned to the church’s laundries as unpaid labor, subjected to horrific abuse and humiliation as atonement for their moral transgressions.
Director Peter Mullan takes up the case of three of these women, each a composite of real women he first encountered in a British documentary on the subject titled “Sex in a Cold Climate.” Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) shames her family when she is raped by her cousin at a relative’s wedding. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) disgraces her family when she has a child out of wedlock and is forced to give her baby up for adoption. Bernadette’s (Nora-Jane Noone) sin is simply that she is pretty and precocious — she is sure to get in trouble sooner or later.
Upon their arrival at the Magdalene Laundry outside Dublin in 1964, the young women come to realize that they are essentially prisoners of the Sisters of Mercy and the unmerciful Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan). Working 364 days a year they are allowed no visitors and are forbidden to speak to one another. Physical and mental abuse are daily occurances at the hands of nuns. Escape attempts are met with vicious punishment. It is intense and often uncomfortable to watch.
Still, they manage to befriend each other and meet Crispina (Eileen Walsh), a simple minded young woman who has already spent several years working in the laundry. Crispina’s story is tragic as well: her illegitimate son is looked after by her sister, but the only contact she has with them is through a locked gate when the nuns are distracted by other matters. When Crispina publicly exposes the sexual abuse she has endured at the hands of the parish priest, she is swiftly extracted from the laundry and committed to a mental institution.
Mullan is ultimately successful in telling this story because he resists the temptation to be melodramatic. The performances of the young women are powerful and convincing, especially Noone’s, who as Bernadette is both bewildered and infuriated by her situation, an orphan who trades one imprisoning institution for another. McEwan, who could have played Sister Bridget as an unrelenting sadist, instead manages to infuse the character with a sense of the divine motivation she feels: she truly believes she is helping these “wayward” young women.
While it would be easy to view “The Magdalene Sisters” as a simplistic attack on the Catholic Church (and there has been a great deal of uproar surrounding it), the film is really more about the consequences of surrendering personal freedom and responsibility to an absolute authority. Each of the young women must not only endure the incomprehensible brutality imposed by the nuns, they are forced to come to terms with the fact that their families were complicit in their incarceration. It is a painful journey that carries life long physical and emotional scars.
This is obviously not the kind of “feel good” film most American audiences are accustomed to. It’s all the more difficult to absorb when it’s revealed that the last Magdalene Laundries were closed in 1996. Despite the tragic subject, it is certainly a film worth taking in with mothers, daughters and sisters — one that is sure to stimulate dialogue.
