Miramax Films A nun leads stars Dorothy Duffy, Nora-Jane Noone, and Anne Marie Duff (left to right) in Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters."

Called "a rancorous provocation" by a Vatican newspaper, Peter Mullan's film highlights the Church's role in the ruin of thousands of Irish women

By Gerry Regan
Producer/The Wild Geese Today

The scene: a room with a dozen bunks in the Magdalene laundry outside Dublin in 1964. A man named O'Connor shoves his daughter Una into the room. She cries, suffering blows from her father. Thrown on her bed, her weeks-long escape from the place at an end, she says: "I just want to come home. I hate it here. ... Please don't leave me here."

Her father stops en route to the door, removes his belt from his waist and begins lashing her. His face consumed with fury, he tells her: "You got no mother. You got no father. You killed us both!" He storms out, with the riposte to the other inmates, "Who are you looking at, you whores!"

It is a painful scene to witness, one of many that make Scottish director and actor Peter Mullan's "The Magdalene Sisters" a compelling, if unsettling, portrayal of the wanton psychological destruction of thousands of women in such "asylums" under the auspices of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

That the three principal characters—Bernadette (portrayed by Nora-Jane Noone), Rose (Dorothy Duffy), and Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff)—ultimately escape the ravages of the institution, albeit scarred for life, gives the film a fleeting sense of triumph. But the postscripts for these fictional characters, drawn from actual survivors' accounts, suggest their triumph was incomplete, as one of the women leaves Ireland, eventually going through three divorces, another remains single and childless, and the third dies in her early 50s.

Miramax Films Nora-Jane Noone as Bernadette and Eileen Walsh as Crispina

Director Mullan ("Orphans") sets his stunning evocation of institutional inhumanity in this bleak landscape of thankless toil, amid the humid and hot laundries and backbreaking scrubbing and carrying, and stolen snippets of conversation, seven days a week, 10 hours a day. As portrayed by Mullan, the self-respect and will to resist of these women is eventually beaten out of them. In its two hours, the film relates a powerful, haunting story, burnished by stunning cinematography and score, artful storytelling, and strong performances throughout.

The film focuses on the three young Irish women, typically naive, as the Swinging '60s unleashes sexual revolutions in the United States and Britain but passes Ireland by. These women, as true victims, are in the wrong time and place. Comely Bernadette, an orphan, is caught flirting with boys through a school-yard fence. Rose gives birth out of wedlock. Margaret is raped by her cousin at a wedding reception.

An early scene, a wedding reception, provides a compelling entrée to the film. Dancing couples are caught up in the revel and frenzied pace of jigs and waltzes. A handsome young priest plays a bodhran, providing a furious tempo for "The Well Below the Valley," depicting Jesus' encounter with the quintessential fallen woman, Mary Magdalene.

The music stirs a sense of abandon in the room, recalling the pagan, sensuous Ireland that lies beneath its Christian veneer. A cousin asks Margaret, about 17, to follow him, and they both go to an empty room upstairs, where he rapes her. They both return to the reception.

Rose Dunne gives birth to a son, born out of wedlock, and from her hospital bed, appeals to her mother. "Did you look at him, Ma? Isn't he beautiful?" Her mother refuses. Finally, a priest tells Rose: "Would you have the child pay ... for your sins not his, I remind you," and he insists she relinquish him for adoption. She signs the requisite form, then the priest disappears down the hall with her baby. Rose's father restrains her as, hysterical, she screams, "Don't let them take my baby!"

The lives of Rose, Margaret and Bernadette merge, with those of dozens of other women young and old, at a Magdalene laundry outside Dublin. They join a line of women, in brown formless smocks, belongings in wooden crates, walking in line, through the halls. The superior, Sister Bridget, portrayed by veteran actress Geraldine McEwan, interviews the girls, saying to Margaret and Rose, "Blessed Mary, two simpletons in one day!" Bernadette, she brands "a temptress." She tells them, "Here you may redeem yourselves by working beyond human endurance, to remove the stains of the sins you have committed."

There are a few light moments, such as when Bernadette hoists her smock and gives Brendan, a boy helping on a delivery truck, a glimpse of her genitalia, hoping she can convince him to help her escape. A crouching Brendan takes in the nova terra, while exhaling his cigarette smoke. "It's not a chimney," Bernadette chides him. Later, Margaret spies Crispina, who has the mind of a 12-year-old, coerced into giving fellatio to a priest. Outraged, Margaret puts stinging nettles into his laundry, and later the priest, leading a very public service and in growing agony, claws at his clothes, finally doffing them as he flees. The nuns are appalled, but the girls, except for Crispina, enjoy one of the few laughs in the films.

The town of Dumfries, on the west coast of Scotland, stands in ably for Dublin, making use of a former Benedictine convent to realize the laundry and nearby mountains, while helping avoid the "political hindrances and controversy" Mullan found in Ireland, according to the film's production notes. They state that Irish newspapers refused to run classified ads seeking information from former inmates and nuns.

Miramax Films Dorothy Duffy as Rose

In fact, none of the church figures depicted have redeeming qualities, bar the musician, perhaps. The film has been slammed by a Vatican newspaper as "an angry and rancorous provocation." Raised a Catholic, Mullan denies the film is anti-Catholic, saying "I regard it as an attempt to right an enormous injustice done to thousands of young girls over a great many years."

Efforts to get comments from the headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland, who ran many of the laundries, have been unsuccessful. However, Willie Walsh, the bishop of Killaloe diocese in County Clare, told CBS News' Steve Kroft in an on-air interview in August 1999: "I who lived in that society have a deep sense of shame at the wrongs that have been done to (the inmates of the Magdalene laundries). I would see an obligation on us to make some effort to make our reparations ... not a mattter for just the nuns or the religous orders, but for all of us in society."

Mullan, who portrayed Una O'Connor's father, states in the film's production notes: "O'Connor's faith, family dignity and personal reputation seem to matter more to him than his own child's welfare, and that was the crux of many a father's dilemma in that time."

This would also seem to be the dilemma then confronting Church-dominated Ireland, and the forlorn women of the Magdalene laundries. Few of the estimated 30,000 women who passed through the laundries were major-league sinners, certainly not by today's standards. Bernadette, whose hair was shorn to deter her from another escape attempt, asks at one point: "What in God's name have we done to deserve this?" Mullan's tour de force provides a very disquieting answer -- nothing. WGT

RELATED RESOURCES

• "The Magdalene Sisters" Wikipedia
• An Adoptee From Ireland Reflects on The Magdalenes (Mari Steed)
• Adopted Peoples Association(AdoptionIreland.com)
• Mercy International Centre (Sisters of Mercy, Dublin)
• Interview with actress Eileen Walsh (Iofilm.com)
• BreakingNews.ie Review
• RottenTomatoes.com on "The Magdalene Sisters"
• The Magdalene Sisters controversy
• "The Magdalene Sisters" Guardian Review

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