At The Movies

Get Thee to a Nunnery

The Magdalene Sisters
(**1/2)
  
Sasha Stone
Mirror film critic
  
   The touchy subject of overt female sexuality has been used often in films dealing with the coming-of-age of a male. There are usually one or two girls who do things like lift their skirts or force contact with the innocent boy. This is often seen, from a tender artist’s point of view, to be the moment barriers were broken. It is as if, for men, virginity is but a state of mind.
   However, very few films deal with the power women possess and what it feels like to possess it. Women in film are often symbols of sexuality, virginity, beauty, motherhood — but are they ever whole human beings with their own spectrum of emotions? Rarely.
   The perfect opportunity to explore this would have been in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters. Unfortunately, Mullan doesn’t see his female characters beyond the single dimension they symbolize to him – and this is the main problem with an otherwise interesting and, in some ways, groundbreaking film.
   In The Magdalene Sisters three young girls’ lives are torn asunder when, for one reason or another, they are ripped from their homes and forced to endure the strict discipline of sadistic nuns in an Irish Catholic nunnery/laundry in the 1950s and ’60s.
   In the Shakespeare tragedy, Hamlet heartlessly orders Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery.” What she would have had to endure is what these three girls, and others who came before them, did. This means being shunned by “decent” society, given no rights or wages and expected to give their lives up for God. Is it any wonder Ophelia threw herself in the river? She had two options: submit or escape.
   The three women, on whose true story the film is based, enter the nunnery at the same time. Bernadette (a scene-stealing Nora-Jane Noone), a flirty orphan, is caught making eye contact with boys one afternoon and that is enough to confine her. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is first seen holding her bastard child, the one her own mother won’t even look at, and is then forced to give up her baby and made to repent for her harlot ways at the nunnery. Finally, there’s Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) who is raped by her cousin at a dance.
   In one of the best scenes in the film, the relatives of the girl are whispering amongst each other and the conclusion they ultimately draw is that she provoked her own attack. We only see their expressions and reactions, we never hear the words exchanged. Soon, the girl is taken to get the “devil of desire” out of her -- if the cousin was motivated to rape, she must have done something.
   Once confined, the girls are abused by the repressed and cruel nuns whose answer to everything is that the girls are whores, harlots and temptresses, and nothing they could ever say or do would change that — not until their spirits are broken and they accept God into their lives.
   Life is spoken about as unbearable, but Mullan fails to adequately portray the nuns and the nunnery as so awfully bad as to be shocking. Yes, the girls’ hair is cut, yes they are swatted for disobedience and no, none deserve to be there. Somehow, and this is mainly due to the flat characterizations of the girls, there doesn’t appear to be the necessary amount of evidence to illicit the kind of sympathy the film is asking from us. The nuns are played as meek small women who can be bullied fairly easily. Either they were a lot worse in real life than in the film or there is a very important piece of the puzzle missing.
   Also absent from the film is that element in girls that would make them feel guilty for having had sexual feelings in the first place. The women who have their babies taken away, for instance, are dealt with only as heartbroken mothers — but we’re never given the opportunity to see their grief over submitting to a moment of passion even if, especially if, it meant losing everything for it.
   That lack makes this a one-sided tale and as such it loses some dramatic impact. The nuns, for instance, are portrayed as all bad, with absolutely no human kindness and no ability to relate to another’s pain. It is the conflicting emotions of someone who is abusive — their ability to be nice sometimes and then suddenly hateful that is the most scarring -- you never know exactly where they stand.
   Even with its faults, The Magdalene Sisters does do one thing absolutely right: it skewers the Catholic Church with as much outrage as the institution deserves, especially considering the recent molestation revelations. Lately, the Catholic Church seems to be revealing itself as a haven for hypocrites and itself a house of ill repute. Any sin can be forgiven once a person offers him/herself up to God — personal responsibility be damned — we are victims of demons, not of our own, gasp, desire. In one scene, a victim of a perverted priest shrieks in public “You are not a man of God!” over and over until she is hauled off to an asylum. No kidding.
   And it is perhaps the greatest irony of all that the two women most important in Catholicism would have been themselves hauled off to the nunnery: Mary, an unwed teen mother, and Mary Magdalene, a whore. That the names of these two women are invoked upon the three girls who are merely navigating through the complex world of human emotion and desire is where the film succeeds at what it is trying to accomplish. The church is, was and likely will always be far too cruel to human beings. (The last of the Magdalene laundries closed only in 1996.)
   The Magdalene Sisters ultimately builds a powerful and shattering metaphor: that religion is a prison. The whole philosophy involves being trapped and repressed. Is it any wonder some of the worst crimes against the innocent are being perpetrated behind those dark and sacred walls? Mullan, in his own way, is helping to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes — crimes apparently no one but God could see.