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The Magdalene Sisters Review by Adrian Hyland Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters" took the Golden Lion best film award at the Venice Film Festival last year, and there may be a point of interest in the irony of this deeply unreligious film finding acceptance in the home of Catholicism, but the movie itself is relentlessly crude, and it left me feeling that the filmmakers had barely scratched the surface of what is undoubtedly great subject matter. The film has been widely praised for its depiction of the institutionalised abuse suffered by the young women of the Magdalene Laundries in the Catholic Ireland of the 1960s; in simply bringing the matter to public attention Mullan can feel proud of what he has achieved. It's just a shame that the film isn't better. In keeping with the directorial style of his previous effort "Orphans", Mullan employs the 'hit them so hard they think it's art' approach, (subtlety is not part of this filmmaker's vocabulary), and although Annie-Marie Duff persuades as Margaret, a girl who is raped by a cousin and sent to the Magdalene to hide the family shame, the rest of the cast strain under the weight of the material, except for Geraldine McEwan who enjoys herself in what she clearly views as an audition for the role of 'villain' in the next Bond film. The story of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries is one of atrocities committed in the name of religion, and at its heart is a fundamental question: what is the origin of evil? Mullan seems to have made a deliberate decision not to attempt to contextualise the behaviour of his nuns; there is no reference to the social or political situation that prevailed in Ireland at the time. This suggests that for Mullan the buck stops with the religious men and women directly responsible for carrying out the warped acts we see in the film. Having opted for this microcosmic, 'character study' approach, shouldn't some attempt then have been made to humanise these characters, rather than presenting them as grotesque, cartoon-like figures, counting money and gobbling food with reckless glee? "The Magdalene Sisters" is one of those 'based on real events' movies that conspicuously fails to deliver anything that feels like a real event, and in the same way the director failed to show us why the eldest brother in "Orphans" chose to stay at the side of his deceased mother rather than reconcile with his non-religious (and still living) brothers, Mullan seems uninterested in why the nuns in his new film act as they do. There is no insight into the origins of their behaviour, no moment when we feel that jolt of recognition that would make their subsequent actions truly shocking. Their acts of evil come out of nowhere, and the movie misses the one chance to transcend its drearily secular convictions: when one of the girls, in the midst of all this physical and psychological torture, decides to join the sisterhood and become a nun, the moment passes in the blink of an eye and we never see her again. The film may go down well with those who like pain and suffering shoved down their throat, but anyone expecting a serious meditation on the duality of the religious experience, with the depth of a film like Fred Schepisi's "The Devil's Playground" or Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest", will be disappointed. This movie reminded me more of another famously 'hard-hitting' exposé, Alan Parker's "Midnight Express". Like Parker, Mullan could never be accused of taking his audience's intelligence for granted, but at least Parker is a technician and interested in the possibilities of lighting and editing; "The Magdalene Sisters" is so resolutely unatmospheric that, by the time the inevitable postscripts detailing the subsequent lives of the characters appeared, I was looking forward to stepping out of the world of this film and into the comparatively bewitching audiovisual garden of Eden that is Newmarket on a Monday night. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |