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Film
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The Magdalene Sisters
What Midnight Express did for Turkish prisons, The Magdalene Sisters does for the Irish laundries.
Thursday, July 31, 2003
By Susan Michals
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Imagine being imprisoned for giving a man a wink or a sideways glance. Or beaten because you were the victim of a rape. No, this isn’t Afghanistan and these women do not have to live behind the burqa; this is 20th century Ireland and the perpetrators of abuse are members of the good old Catholic Church.
Director Peter Mullan brings The Magdalene Sisters to the screen, a riveting and painful tale of young Irish women forced into servitude only because they are viewed as potential sexual threats to the sanctity of the Catholic Church.
Though the Irish Laundries were very real, Mullan’s account is a compelling blend of both fact and fiction. It takes place in the 1960’s, and focuses on the lives of four “fallen women”, whose lives are forever changed the second the step foot inside on of the Magdalene Laundries. Now, these girls had committed no crime – and one in particular, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is still a virgin – she was sent to the laundries based on the sheer suspicion that she would one day become a flagrant and unabashed slut because she likes to flirt. While the women's liberation movement is virtually sweeping the globe, these women are stripped of any shred of dignity condemned to indefinite sentences of servitude to atone for their supposed sins. Not only are they banned from communicating with each other, they are frequently beaten and their heads shaved to prevent them from escaping.
Welcome to the Irish gulag, run by the Sisters of Perpetual Abuse.
These nuns are so evil and vile, they make Hannibal Lechter seem like an okay guy. They manipulate and abuse both physically and mentally, and instill the fear that escaping back to the real world would be a far heavier sentence than to stay here and forever repent.
The Magdalene Sisters is a film that causes an immediate emotional outrage as much as it educates. These laundries were nothing more than slave labor camps for thousands of young girls seen as unfit to hang in society because they were ‘tarnished’. Of the four women in the film, Bernadette is the sassy lass; the one who refuses to accept any kind of punishment for simply being a woman. At one point in the film, she is taking care of another woman; a lifer at the laundry who sees the nuns as all goodness and piety. As she watches this woman die, she realizes she cannot accept the fate which lies before her; it is nothing more than an abysmal existence filled with boredom and dirty laundry.
Mullan has done a magnificent job of taking us inside these hallowed halls; the film – while not wont of dialogue – relies much more heavily on visual stimuli to really send the point home. This form of narrative is ten times more effective than had he resorted to telling the tale verbally from the four women’s perspectives.
He has cinematographer Nigel Willoughby to thank; a man who before Magdalene had only one film to his credit in this particular role. His touch is melodic and velvety, enticing us into the ghastliness of the laundries before smacking us hard in the face of reality.
The four actresses, particularly Ms. Noone, become a new kind of empowered woman in the eyes of the viewer. For even though they have no clue what is going on in the swinging 60’s of the outside world, they manage (for the most part) to hold their own face to face with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church they had been raised to know and love.
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