Scrubbing for Jesus

10 April 2012

Though filmed in Galloway, Scotland, Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters presents a picture of Catholic Ireland such as no country would wish to show the world.

Until as late as 1997, we're told in an end credit that exhales relief like the obituary notice of an endemic disease, that country tolerated an institutionalised reign of exploitation, abuse and intimidation of the sex and age-group least able to defend itself against its religious establishment. Namely, girls who had sinned, or were simply thought capable of sinning.

It is an unbelievable charge sheet, but apparently well attested to by the victims. Mullan's film opens with the three case histories - fictitious individuals, but composites of several real-life teenage girls sent to the Magdalene order's reform schools.

Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is assaulted by her drunken cousin at a country ceilidh: but it's she who's packed off in the morning, her chastity irretrievably damaged and her family shamed.

Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is already in an orphanage, but at an age when vanity over her glorious head of hair makes the supervisors see her as a playground temptress for the local lads: off she goes, too, to sweat and labour for the good of her soul.

Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has given birth to a baby outside marriage. Bastardy is her sin, and she must pay for the existence of a child ruthlessly, unfeelingly filched from the mother's bed by a po-faced priest.

The experiences of these girls, and others, some who've grown into middle age in captivity, others half-witted and clinging vainly to their St Christopher medal for protection, are exposed by Mullan's direction and script without fear or favour.

It is a devastating indictment of a country such as Eire, where the priesthood was until recently above question, complaint and even the law. Now, of course, disgraced by pederasty scandals, and nearly bankrupted by class actions from the victims, the Irish hierarchy must be glad to see the back of its Magdalene sweatshops. Just as the Nazis put moral mottos like Work Makes Free above the gates of their extermination camps, these places were founded on the belief that Labour Promotes Chastity.

The girls, dressed uniformly in drab brown smocks, wash the dirty linen of the local townsfolk and simultaneously cleanse themselves of the stains of their sins.

Nothing is spared us. The dreadful sneakiness of authority backed by biblical texts is latent in every scene, often overt, too. Nuns tuck into hot breakfasts while the girls, screened from them by a confessional grille, exist on plates of scraps and an "improving" commentary of scripture.

A couple of winking sisters line up their naked charges and comment on their busts, buttocks and "bushes" as if awarding points in an obscene game show. Forbidden to speak to each other, much less to communicate with the outside world, some of the girls are immobilised when an open door offers them a chance of escape. One girl who takes it is dragged back by her Da (played by Mullan himself) and "belted" into docile compliance in front of a Mother Superior, who commends him for his discipline.

Geraldine McEwan plays this sainted hypocrite with the cleverest twist on the type: she doesn't bellow, she simpers. Each insult is couched in the sweetest of tongues, but it leaves a sting in the flesh and soul.

It's the same reverend mother who gets up at the Christmas concert and coyly confesses her own "sin" - as a girl, she loved "the fillums". And now they'll see one. It turns out to be The Bells of St Mary's, starring a wimpled and lachrymose Ingrid Bergman (ironically branded a sinner herself less than five years later). Thus, says Mullan indirectly, did Hollywood collude in the promotion of the inviolate sanctity of nuns and priests.

One curious absence in the film is sex. Though it's a woman's prison movie in all but name, sexual liaisons of the lesbian kind don't feature. Bernadette, intent on escape, tries to suborn the laundry boy by dropping her knickers and giving him a peep of the forbidden paradise. He looks intently between drags on a fag. "Hey, it's not a chimney," says the brazen girl.

There are other moments of grim humour: the priest blessing new washing machines with holy water, for instance; and the horrifying indignity inflicted on this same cleric when his vestments are washed with an irritant powder and he's forced to strip naked at the altar.

But if there is one fault in the film it is that Peter Mullan's understandable difficulties with his own angermanagement lead him into overloading his agenda with endless humiliation, mental and corporal punishment and unbearable despair. I am sure everything in the film happenedin many of the Magdalene asylumsbut surely not all of it in one single institution.

The absence until almost the last five minutes of any opposition with which we can empathise also means that it comes to feel like an inventory of masochistic female behaviour. The wider community isn't represented. The links between church and state are totally ignored.

When two of the girls eventually escape, it seems they achieve it by improbably easy (never mind implausibly noisy) means, though the line, "They can't touch you once you're 'respectable'" absolutely reverberates with social irony.

Mullan has the makings of a very considerable director - because he has something to say and the passion to say it - but he needs to pace himself and edit his own feelings. At present, he gives every scene the same shock value. A quiet line, like the one just quoted, often does more - such as when a visiting archbishop, for example, finds his way blocked by a defiant Margaret, whose brother has just "rescued" her from incarceration, the embarrassed prelate steps around her and mutters "I think we should move on."

"Move on..." the cry of every convicted churchman in recent times who wants to put the past behind him and hope it will be forgotten. With films as good as The Magdalene Sisters around, small hope.

The Film Council's investment from the National Lottery in The Magdalene Sisters was £643,000 and 10p. For The One And Only (reviewed over the page) the Film Council's investment through the National Lottery-financed Pathe franchise was £1.5 million.

The Magdalene Sisters
Cert: 15

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