A powerful new film about Ireland's Magdalen institutions is an unflinching evocation of the degradation and brutality experienced by young women, reports Michael Dwyer. It is about to be shown at international film festivals before opening here in October
Only one film has been selected for all three of the world's most important autumn film festivals this year. Peter Mullan's powerful and disturbing drama, The Magdalen Sisters, had its world première last night at the Venice Film Festival, where it is screening in competition for the event's major prize, the Golden Lion, and it clearly ranks as a serious contender.
It goes on to have its North American première at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12th, and will be shown later next month at the highly selective New York Film Festival, which annually invites only two dozen films.
On October 6th, Mullan's film will have its Irish première as the opening presentation of the 47th Cork Film Festival. It has been passed with a 15PG certificate by the Irish film censor and is scheduled to go on cinema release here on October 25th.
While the film firmly confronts an issue already familiar to audiences in Ireland - from Louis Lentin's revelatory documentary, Dear Daughter, and the recent RTÉ/BBC television drama, Sinners - it should prove an eye-opening experience for audiences at home and abroad through its unflinching depiction of the degradation and brutality experienced by young Irish women at the Magdalen asylums run by the Sisters of Mercy.
The Magdalen Sisters is a tough, emotionally loaded and deeply unsettling drama made with classically simple cinematic skill by Peter Mullan, the Scottish actor who won the best actor award at Cannes in 1998 for Ken Loach's film, My Name Is Joe, and whose many notable acting credits also include Riff-Raff, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and The Claim.
After making a number of award-winning shorts, Mullan wrote and directed his first feature film in 1997, the critically admired Orphans, which observed four traumatised siblings gathered in Glasgow on the eve of their mother's funeral.
Although The Magdalen Sisters is set entirely in Ireland, Mullan filmed it in Scotland, where a convent in Dumfries doubled as the Dublin institution at the film's centre. Mullan says he was inspired to write and direct it after viewing a Channel 4 documentary on the subject, Sex in a Cold Climate.
He says he was appalled by the hidden suffering of the Magdalen women, deeply moved by the documentary footage he saw and incensed by the level of injustice these women suffered.
Prompted to bring their story to a wider audience, he used video evidence as the basis for the fictionalised characters in his film, allowing their testimonials to speak for themselves and taking the essence of these to make into a feature film. "It's a drama, it's a fiction, but is inspired by those stories," he says. "It's a fictional film that unfortunately happens to be true." The focus of the film is on four young Irishwomen, three of whom are free spirits as the film begins and are incarcerated in the same Magdalen institution before the opening credits roll. All four are vulnerable victims of a rigidly patriarchal and deeply conservative society. The setting is Dublin from 1964 to 1968. This was the era dubbed the Swinging Sixties with its celebration of sexual liberation and fledgling feminism - concepts that would have been unimaginable within a Magdalen asylum.
Margaret (played by Anne-Marie Duff, who also featured in Sinners) is attending a wedding when she is held down and raped by her cousin while their families celebrate downstairs. After she tells a friend what happened, the word spreads and her father and the parish priest determine her fate, to be sent to a Magdalen asylum, while the rapist gets off with a chastisement.
Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is an attractive teenaged girl who lives in an orphanage and commits the crime of engaging in some very mild flirting with local boys - which is witnessed by the principal, who decides that she ought to be sent away to a Magdalen home.
Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has just given birth out of wedlock. Her mother refuses even to look at the baby boy. Her father arrives at the hospital with a priest who declares that the child is "a bastard" and will be "an outcast in society", and ought to be raised in "a good Catholic home with a loving mother and father". The child is taken from her and Rose is sent away.
Crispina (Cork actress Eileen Walsh in an outstanding performance) is already installed at the Magdalen institution when Margaret, Bernadette and Rose arrive there. A simple young woman, she has committed the same sin as Rose, and her young son is being raised by her sister.
After the credits sequence, the character are introduced to life in the Magdalen asylum and the superior, the intimidating Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) explains how they will atone for their sins and be saved from eternal damnation by a regimented life of work and prayer. She explains that the institution is named after Mary Magdalen, the former prostitute who repented before Christ and washed his feet.
While she addresses them, she counts the takings of the institution's laundry business - at which the newcomers will work long hours every day. Ironically, Sister Bridget has a framed photograph of John F. Kennedy on her desk; only years later would details of his many sexual indiscretions become known to her and to all the many Irish households who prominently displayed smiling images of the late president.
One of the most startling early scenes in the movie is the almost casual revelation that some of the inmates of the asylum are much older women, who have spent 30 to 40 years incarcerated there and are now so institutionalised that they could never again cope with the outside world. One of them, beautifully played by Britta Smith, personifies the lost innocence of these older women who have grown accustomed to living under a reign of terror and have been indoctrinated to regard sex and the human body with fear and loathing.
The nuns - who enjoy a full Irish breakfast while the hard-working inmates have to make do with porridge - are shown to be capable of terrible cruelty: beating the girls, shaving their heads, spreading the gospel of love through violence and exploitation.
One of the movie's creepiest sequence involves two nuns expressing their closet lesbianism through sexual humiliation by forcing a group of girls to exercise naked and then taunting them as they compare their breasts, bottoms and pubic hair.
There is even worse to follow, when one of the girls accidentally discovers another girl giving oral sex to a priest just before he says Mass in the convent.
The collusion of the families with this nefarious system is emphasised in a sequence where Peter Mullan himself takes the cameo role of a brutal father whose daughter has escaped from the institution. He responds by beating her and returning her to the Magdalen asylum. He calls the other girls whores as he storms out.
The girls get a day off on Christmas Day, when their treat is a screening of a movie selected by the Archbishop of Dublin - The Bells of St Mary's - the sentimental 1945 production which idealised priests and nuns and starred Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman as the kindly, dedicated Father O'Malley and Sister Benedict.
Coincidentally, during the period over which The Magdalen Sisters takes place, the movie that was breaking box-office records all over Ireland was the saccharine musical, The Sound of Music, which also presented a radically different depiction of nuns compared with the activities of some of their real-life counterparts behind closed doors at the Magdalen institutions.
However, one of the most effective elements of Mullan's film is its firm refusal to sentimentalise the fate of its characters or to depict the nuns as stock villains. Instead, it presents the nuns as women who are just as institutionalised as their charges.
GERALDINE McEwan's portrayal of Sister Bridget is particularly subtle, as she shifts gears through the nun's mood swings from charm to guile to severity to sadism. "Geraldine gave me the opportunity to show an immediate, breathing contradiction," Mullan says. "She plays Sister Bridget as someone who doesn't look particularly nasty, who doesn't sound particularly nasty and someone who is not particularly nasty." McEwan says she was attracted to the role for both the complexities of her character and the powerfully written script. "As an actor, as someone who interprets other people's writing, what is called for is to make the character human," she says. "That's what is interesting. Sister Bridget has things that she might have wished were different in her life had she not been given this great belief and mission to bear."
Like many an accomplished actor who has turned director, Mullan invests a great deal of trust in his own mostly unfamiliar cast, giving them the space that allows their performances to breathe and grow and encouraging them to eschew clichéd mannerisms. The key to the universally naturalistic quality of the performances he elicits is in allowing all of the characters, no matter how unsympathetically they are drawn, to behave as if they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing.
That authenticity heightens the disturbing power of the drama, drawing the viewer deeper inside the film's suffocatingly tense atmosphere and only very rarely offering the indulgence of any light relief. It prompts comparisons with many prison movies, and the realisation that at least most prisoners, unlike the Magdalen inmates, know they are going to be released some time.
The film is uncompromising to the end, refusing to soften the bitter pill it delivers with any soft, dramatically contrived resolutions.
It closes on a caption stating that as many as 30,000 women were detained at Magdalen asylums throughout Ireland before the last one closed in 1996.
The Magdalen Sisters opens the Cork Film Festival on October 6th and is released in Ireland on October 25th.