2003-11-16

I'm always curious when I see people walk out of movies. I always want to ask them why they're leaving. Two people walked out of the screening of The Magdalene Sisters that I attended. I wish I knew why: was it because the movie brought back painful memories of some sort of abuse? Was it because they were offended at the way the Catholic Church was portrayed? Perhaps it was for another reason altogether, but I'll never know.

The Magdalene Sisters is a movie about events that would seem almost impossible to believe if there weren't actual documentation of them. However, there is more than enough testimony to go around that the Magdalene Asylums were institutions in Scotland and Ireland where "fallen women" were incarcerated and forced to work for 7 days a week, 364 days a year (they were allowed Christmas day off). Over 30,000 women were forced into the Magdalene Laundries, and the last laundry closed in 1996.

The film, which is fictional but based on accounts from various women who were forced into Magdalene Laundries, focuses on the stories of four young women, three of whom are sent to the Laundries in 1964. Margaret is sent to the Laundries after her cousin rapes her at a family wedding; Rose is sent there after having a child out of wedlock; Bernadette is sent from the orphanage to the Laundries because the boys find her too attractive and the principal thinks she is a "temptress" (like Mary Magdalene, which is where the Laundries' name comes from). The final woman, Crispina, has already been in the Laundries for two years when we meet her; we don't see anything of her past, but we do learn that she is mentally slow and that she too had a baby out of wedlock.

The girls who are taken to the Laundries have no idea where they're going or why they're being sent away; it's not until they're actually inside that they realize that no one is coming to rescue them and that their families have disowned them. It seems as though no one on the outside really understands how abusive the nuns are to the inmates, and what worse is that those who do know don't seem to care.

The scenes of abuse are absolutely harrowing. Two of the scenes involve head-shaving, a common orm of religious punishment for women, as it's supposed to humble the woman and take away her vanity. If the actual head-shaving isn't horrible enough, the insane delight that the nuns take in every punishment they hand out is so sadistic that it would probably make Hannibal Lecter cringe. Geraldine McEwan in particular is fantastic as the psychotic Sister Bridget. You just never know when she's going to snap.

A lot of the time, the movie reminded me a lot of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, which is also about religious zealotry and misogyny. Both the novel and this movie point out that it is not only men who maintain patriarchy and oppression within hierarchical systems, but also women. The nuns are cruel and vindictive, and totally power-mad, taking keen delight in humiliating the inmates in any way possible, mental or physical. When it is discovered that one of the priests is sexually abusing one of the inmates, Sister Bridget sends his victim to a mental institution as punishment (and insurance that no one will believe her if she talks about the abuse).

Although the movie focuses on one of the skeletons in the Catholic Church's closet, it would be incorrect to say that the movie is primarily anti-Catholic. Let's not forget that the Catholics certainly don't have a monopoly on cruelty towards women, or on oppression in general. In fact, one of the most awful things about The Magdalene Sisters is the way that it reminds us of other societies where women continue to be locked away, shunned, or stoned to death because of extreme fear of their sexuality or potential power.

At heart, although the movie is about exposing the hidden cruelties and injustices of the Magdalene Laundries, it's also about the amazing way that the human spirit can survive extreme abuse. At one point, one of the inmates tries to kill herself, and one of her rescuers cries, "Why would you do something like that!" Bernadette just looks at her and says, "What a stupid question to ask in a place like this." Yet in the end, it is Bernadette who manages to stand up to Sister Bridget and escape the hellhole of the Magdalene Laundries, and the movie's striking last image of her burns itself into the viewer's memory.

Posted by polarcanuck at 4:59 p.m.

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