The Magdalene Sisters

08/16/03 “The Magdalene Sisters”

Starring:Geraldine McEwan, Dorothy Duffy, Anne-Marie Duff, Eileen Walsh, Nora-Jane Noone

Directed by:Peter Mullan

Rating:Off the Rag

Plot Summary: an unflinching and compelling emotional drama, charting several years in the young lives of three “fallen women” who were rejected by their families and abandoned to the mercy of the Catholic Church in 1960′s Ireland. While women’s liberation is sweeping the globe, these women are stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of servitude in The Magdalene Laundries, in order to atone for their “sins.” The last Magdalene Asylum in Ireland closed in 1996, and only since has the true horror of conditions in these institutions begun to emerge.

It’s difficult to know how to begin to talk about a film like “The Magdalene Sisters” It was a powerful film to watch, and as a woman it is a frightening story to try to absorb. Denial would be so much more comfortable.

Like a Catholic nun of the order of the “Sisters of Mercy” who spoke after our viewing of the film, it would be easier to label this film a piece of “artwork which is dramatized and changed for emotional effect.” But that would be a further rejection of the truth for women whose voices have already gone unheard for far too long.

We follow three young women on their journey to the Magdalene Laundries. Margaret, raped by her cousin at a wedding, her crime was making public what happened. Bernadette, an orphan, whose sin was only being too temptingly beautiful. Rose, who had a baby when she wasn’t married. These three girls arrive at the Magdalene Laundries on the same day, with no explanation of why they’ve been sent there, no word on how long their “sentence” is to be. They are told only that they are there to atone for their sins, by working beyond human endurance, as Mary Magdalene did, in order to get into heaven.

In a way that vividly reinforces how female sexuality is and has always been repressed, feared and demonized, these women are removed from society for “sins” from which their male counterparts suffer no consequences. The beautiful Bernadette is told that men will be tempted to sin, and she must be removed from society to remove the temptation from them. We never learn what happens to Margaret’s rapist, or the father of Rose’s baby. Presumably they do not pay for their actions, while the girls are made to work from sunup to sundown for cruel, capricious and sadistic nuns, subjected to physical and psychological humiliations beyond endurance, and kept under lock and key in conditions it would be generous to call spartan.

The film is a clear indictment of the Catholic church – which certainly needs indicting, and not nearly enough of an indictment on an Irish society and government so cowed by the power of that church that they did not act on women being deprived of their basic civil liberties.

But the Catholic church has spoken -  scolding both the Toronto and Venice film festivals for giving this film their highest honors, and calling on Disney to sever contact with Miramax, who are distributing the film. Even today the documentary on which this film is based “Sex in a Cold Climate” has never aired on Irish television. The “magdalenes” who still live in Ireland are too ashamed to speak of their experience. Only those who have escaped to other countries are able to speak about what happened to them.

This was a disturbing film to watch, and it was frightening and inspiring at the same time. Much in the way of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” it brought vividly home the way in which society wants to control women by controlling their physical autonomy. How men are allowed and expected to have sexual thoughts, actions, desires, and how women with any of these are to be punished and degraded. But while “The Handmaid’s Tale” is, for now, in the province of fiction, “The Magdalene Sisters” is all too real.

Check out Miramax’s official website here.