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Twisted sisters
The real horror film of the summer is "The Magdalene
Sisters," Peter Mullan's prize-winning excoriation of the
Catholic Church's institutional enslavement of thousands of
so-called "wayward" young women from the mid-1800s to 1996.
By LESLIE (HOBAN) BLAKE
Offoffoff.com
School children learn about slavery as an ancient and
abstract condition. The victors in warring nations enslaved
the vanquished; the Jews were slaves in biblical Egypt;
colonists in pre-revolutionary America (and Australia)
became indentured servants, earning their freedom with seven
years of hard labor. During the molasses-to-rum-to-slave
trade of the antebellum South, Jamaican and African slaves
became unpaid labor with no hope of freedom, save at the whim
of some kind master or by rebellion.
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| THE MAGDALENE SISTERS |
Written and directed by: Peter Mullan.
Cast: Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Eileen Walsh, Mary Murray, Britta Smith, Frances Healy, Eithne McGuinness, Phyllis MacMahon, Rebecca Walsh, Eamonn Owens, Chris Simpson, Sean Colgan, Daniel Costello.
Cinematography: Nigel Willoughby.
Related links:
Official site
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Now Peter Mullan's extraordinary film "The Magdalene
Sisters" exposes yet another form of slavery, not at some
far distant historical perspective, but as recently as late-
20th Century Ireland. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the
Catholic Church set up a series of Magdalen (no e) laundries
(ironically named for the biblical harlot rescued and
pardoned by Christ) to "save" so-called "wayward" Irish
girls. Definitions of wayward ranged from prostitution and
alcoholism, to being orphaned, retarded or giving birth
outside marriage.
The idea was that hard work would redeem these "fallen women"
and there was no work harder than hand laundry. As time went
on, the laundries took on an even more Dickensian flavor as
the church incorporated bits of those early models of
slavery, adding refinements only a religious institution
could devise. They enslaved generations of these girls, for
whom the laundries became virtual prisons without any
possibility of pardon or parole.
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| The film offers the church a chance to
take responsibility for its crimes against thousands of
women. The church's sole response has been to condemn "The
Magdalene Sisters" and Peter Mullan. | |
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Eventually, the church also expanded from an internal
organization for their laundry only, to a money-making
operation handling non-clerical items as well. The girls'
families (who had to sign them over to the laundries) became
the church's partners-in-blasphemy. Together, church and
family refused to ever release them. It was only the
discovery of 133 unmarked graves on church grounds in 1970
that first brought this horror to public light. A play
("Eclipsed") and a Joni Mitchell song ("The Magdalene
Laundries") have indicted both the church and those families —
but they've never formally been prosecuted.
Peter Mullan, the brilliant Scots actor/director ("My Name is
Joe" and "Orphans"), is currently prosecuting them but good,
in his controversial Venice Film Festival Grand Prize winner
"The Magdalene Sisters." A Catholic himself, he was
spurred by a BBC documentary ("Sex in a Cold Climate") on the
subject, to bring knowledge of this "enormous injustice" to a
wider audience. His film focuses on the years between 1964
and 1969 — when the rest of the so-called free world was
experiencing the birth of Women's Lib — and tells the story
of the 30,000-plus Irish women doomed to Magdalene slavery
through the stories of four representative girls.
By the '60s, the reasons for Magdalene incarceration had
loosened so far as to include such ephemera as "being too
pretty," thereby offering temptation to young men (a pre-
emptive kind of rationale that seems all too familiar these
days). That's the reason Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), a
vivacious orphan is spirited off to the Magdalenes, while
Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is sent by her family after a
cousin rapes her. Unmarried Rose (Dorothy Duffy) gives birth
to a child who is immediately taken from her, but Crispina
(Eileen Walsh) who is retarded, gets clandestine visits from
her illegitimate son, whom she sees only through the laundry
fence.
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Others in the institution range from teenagers to gray-haired
biddies, who act as "capos" in return for small favors. The
nuns (as personified by Sister Bridget in a scalding
performance by veteran Geraldine McEwan) are sterile, cruel
bullies who torture the girls and also turn a blind eye when
sexually predatory priests routinely rape their wards. This
is the redemption delivered in lieu of the salvation promised.
As if the work itself were not hardship enough, the girls are
subjected to every form of humiliation — naked parades before
jeering nuns, heads shaved for minor infractions, their very
names taken away. (Rose is arbitrarily renamed
Patricia.) By setting the film in the mid-20th century,
Mullan allows for escape, and some girls did succeed. But in
truth, the last Magdalene, which closed in 1996 (!), still had
40 to 50 inmates, all ill-equipped for any kind of life outside.
This is not an easy film to watch — and the Catholic Church
would certainly rather that no one did — but Mullan's
scathing attack definitely shines a klieg light on these all-
too-recent events. The acting throughout is superlative, even
if occasionally the prison paradigm wears on the audience.
Although I've singled out five actors, this is truly an
ensemble effort in the finest sense of that much overused
term.
The stories of the girls told in this film are based on
hundreds of real Magdalene cases. The Irish government is
still trying to help Magdalene babies — wrested from their
unwed mothers at birth — find those birth mothers who might
still be living. Mullan's film offers the church a chance to
take responsibility for its crimes against these thousands of
women. The church's sole response has been to condemn "The
Magdalene Sisters" and Peter Mullan.
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AUGUST 1, 2003
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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