Why no mercy for the sisters?

Crispin Jackson

The Tablet's cinema critic interviews the director of a searing film about Irish Catholicism's
recent past

Geraldine McEwan as Sister Bridget

THE FIRST point to make about The Magdalene Sisters is that it is a film that everyone should see, particularly Catholics, but I should warn that it is very grim viewing. It features one of the Magdalene laundries in which, during the latter part of the last century, supposedly wayward Irish women, and particularly unmarried mothers, were incarcerated for long periods, some for life. These laundries, or "asylums" as they were called, were run by the Sisters of Mercy on behalf of the Church.

Set in a Dublin laundry in the mid-Sixties, The Magdalene Sisters caused considerable controversy when it won the top prize at last year's Venice film festival. The Vatican newspaper dismissed it as an "angry and rancorous provocation", prompting the Guardian to report that the Church had "rediscovered sin in cinema". That well-known crucible of religious debate, the Daily Mail, ran a two-page feature on what it called "one of the Catholic Church's most shameful secrets". Now, at last, the film is to be released in Britain so we can find out what all the fuss is about.

The scenes of verbal abuse and cruelty are distressing beyond the penny-shocks of today's horror films. In the most painful of these, a group of naked women are lined up in a dank and chilly shower-room and taunted because of their perceived physical imperfections. "You have a bricky's back", one of them is told by a jolly-looking nun, and this is one of the milder comments.

But the most controversial scenes involve the priest who supposedly oversees the inmates' spiritual welfare. At one point he is (discreetly) shown indulging in Clintonesque activities with one of the girls. Later, when some of the other inmates put poison ivy in his vestments, causing him to perform a hurried striptease at an outdoor Mass, that same girl begins scratching madly at her own legs, suggesting recent congress between the two of them. These scenes caused particular opprobrium in Italy: "The fact that the priest is a hypocrite . . . is written on his face and is like a mark that, the director seems to suggest, is cut into all priests", wrote L'Osservatore Romano.

Shortly after the film's triumph in Venice, I interviewed its director, Peter Mullan, best known as an actor in films such as Trainspotting and Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. I asked him bluntly whether these incidents were based on fact, and he assured me that they were. Indeed, he told me that some priests had "three or four [laundry] women on the go". I suggested that he had lumped together the most lurid stories from a number of different laundries and so presented a totally unrepresentative picture of life in these institutions. Again, he insisted that the laundry in the film was quite typical. That was five months ago, and since then - and with all due deference to L'Osservatore Romano - I have not read of a single Magdalene inmate coming forward to defend the laundries or the nuns who ran them. It will be interesting to see what sort of response the film prompts in Britain. Certainly I believe what Peter Mullan told me, but there is one aspect of the film which stretched my credibility to breaking point. If The Magdalene Sisters is to be believed, the nuns who ran the laundries were bereft of all human, let alone Christian, compassion. Indeed, one critic has likened them to the guards in a Nazi concentration camp. Last year, a Tablet reader suggested that many of the nuns might have felt that their own lives had been "blighted", and so took out their frustrations on their young charges. Not if Mullan's film is to be believed: his nuns come across as a thoroughly callous bunch - smiling, but nasty. And they seem remarkably unconcerned with religion. They have no depth, no suggestion of private pain, even of personality. Surely their stories were worth telling, too?

I was particularly unhappy with the character of the head nun, Sr Bridget, played by Geraldine McEwan. "She has things that she might have wished were different in her life", says McEwan, "had she not been given this great belief and mission to bear". I mean no disrespect to this fine actress, but her portrayal brought to my mind the mad, cane-wielding headmaster from the film of Pink Floyd's The Wall - and he was an animated cartoon, drawn by Gerald Scarfe. True, Sr Bridget does shed a few tears after administering a beating to one of the girls, but the only sign of ambiguity I could detect in her was a wicked twinkle in her eye as she crammed the girls' earnings into a tea caddy, suggesting that it was more likely to be spent at Leopardstown racecourse than the missions of the Congo. In his notes, Mullan quotes that over-used expression, "the banality of evil", but there is nothing banal about the way McEwan mutters, "You better be joking, girl", when one of the inmates insists that she make way for her. The question of why so many people given charge of the young and vulnerable end up abusing them is a vexing one, and I rather feel that the film dodges it in its very understandable desire to expose the levels of abuse in the Magdalene laundries.

Yes, it is an "issue" film, but that does not mean that it is a dull one. It focuses on three girls sent to the Dublin laundry on the most preposterous pretexts - and, it should be noted, at the instigation of a parent or guardian. There is no story as such, but rather a string of overlapping dramas, most of them agonising to watch. Particularly painful is an attempted escape by a girl called Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), who persuades a delivery boy to come to the laundry at night and unlock the heavy front door. If only his nerve can hold out for long enough…

A film of this sort requires sound craftsmanship from everyone involved, and that is what it gets. Mullan's script is very well paced, his direction is assured, and the period "feel"' seemed quite convincing (although the film was shot in Dumfries). The acting is stupendous. I was astonished to learn that Nora-Jane Noone had no previous screen experience. She has apparently "been involved with local drama clubs studying drama, music and dance", and if she is representative of the general standard of amateur acting in Dublin, then it is time I paid another visit.

What are the lessons of The Magdalene Sisters? For the Church, there is the need to respond to the issues raised by the film (I will not broach here the vexed subject of compensation, which Mullan mentions in the notes); for all of us, there is the question of why vulnerability is so often met with cruelty. The Magdalene Sisters is a tough, uncompromising film, but it is not an anti-Catholic one. Indeed, it would be a very callous person who did not emerge from it a better person. It arouses compassion, and a fierce indignation against unkindness and injustice, and that surely qualifies it as a highly moral, even Christian, piece of work.

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