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The ambivalent pleasures of The Magdalene Sisters
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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The Magdalene Sisters belongs to a long tradition of artistic works denouncing the evils of Catholicism. Such indictments can hardly be said to have lost their relevance at a time when reports of sexual abuse by priests make the headlines almost weekly. But there’s something inescapably old-fashioned about Peter Mullan’s film, not just about the story it tells — of three Irish girls, Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), and Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who in 1964, for real or imputed sexual delinquency, are sent to a reform school/laundry run by wicked nuns — but about the combination of melodramatic vigor and reformist wrath Mullan brings to the telling of it. The interest of the film is basic, that of innocence abused and then vindicated and of hypocrisy condemned. It’s a highly cinematic fascination: Mullan sets out to show the true faces of innocence and corruption, and two scenes that address the power of film to record these faces are especially revealing. In the first, a visiting priest shoots a home movie of two nuns who act all sweet and embarrassed for the camera. What gives the sequence its piquancy is that we’ve already seen these three characters — the priest and the two nuns — committing the worst sexual abuses depicted in the film: the priest, a few scenes earlier, was glimpsed receiving oral sex from an aphasic and disturbed girl; and the two nuns, in the film’s most painful sequence, lined up their nude charges and singled out the girls with the biggest and the smallest breasts, the thickest pubic hair, and so on. In the priest’s movie, those with the most to lose from the revelation of a true image set about manufacturing a false one. The task of The Magdalene Sisters is to replace this false image with its truth. The second scene is of a Christmas celebration, where the nuns, their charges, and some male visitors gather for a movie show. The head nun, Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), puts on a cute-Irish-nun act, including the mock-scandalous confession that she loves the "fillums." The feature attraction turns out to be Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s, in which Ingrid Bergman plays a nun. This complex sequence brings together, again, sex, power, image, and cinema. Bridget’s nauseating little performance relies on the unstated suggestion that there’s something slightly scandalous in watching films — that watching them is, in fact, a source of sexual pleasure. Furthermore, she appeals to the liberal and humane opinion that even for a nun, such pleasures are innocent enough, as long as they’re taken only on special occasions and with the proper objects. Then there’s Ingrid Bergman, who’s infamous for having left her husband to live with her lover. The sequence makes it clear that both the nuns and the girls identify with Bergman, in different ways: the nuns project onto her their false idealization of a sacrifice they’ve performed in bad faith, whereas the girls see in her their own self-image of martyrdom to repression, of an innocent sexuality punished and thwarted. The satisfaction of The Magdalene Sisters is less equivocal, less corrupt than that afforded by McCarey’s film. For Mullan, the cinema is a vindicator, coming after evil to correct the historical record, punish the guilty, and reward the innocent. The biggest problem with such films is always the lack of a stake for the audience. It’s not we who are guilty. On the contrary, the movie addresses us as enlightened judges taking an inspection tour of a society whose fears, prejudices, and perversions we’ve long outgrown. One of the most interesting aspects of The Magdalene Sisters is that it plays down the on-screen representative of enlightenment (Margaret, who’s portrayed as the most intelligent of the girls and the one best equipped to carry her first-hand knowledge of injustice into the reformist future) in favor of the character (Bernadette) who incarnates the victims’ identification with their torturers. Still, there’s something old-fashioned about that Sadean ambivalence too. Mullan allows us, once again, to say goodbye to the 20th century (and through it, the 19th): the satisfaction we’re afforded is inseparable from nostalgia and from a perverse complicity with what The Magdalene Sisters indicts.
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