The Magdalene Sisters

Rating:
Summary: Power, Moving Film
Review: I found this film to be highly disturbing, but not overly surprising. Being raised Roman Catholic myself, I've heard all of the horror stories that have happened in the past. I couldn't imagine being one of those young girls and having your own family disown you because you got pregnant, even if it wasn't your fault.
The film follows four women who have been disowned by their families and sent to the Madgalene sisterhoood asylum to correct their more or less sinful behaviour. Crispina and Rose have given birth to a pre-marriage child, Margaret got raped by her cousin and the orphan Bernadette had been repeatedly caught flirting with the boys. All have to work in a laundry under the strict supervision of the nuns, who break their wills through sadistic punishments. It's a very powerful movie that I think should be seen by all.

Rating:
Summary: This should be required viewing in religious studies classes
Review: Drab, identical uniforms. Unpaid, enslaved labour. Unquestioned authority. Unquestioning obedience. Loss of identity. If both religion and work set you free, then is work the same as religion, and vice versa? Arbeit macht frei.
But this isn't Auschwitz and National Socialism during the Second World War. This is Ireland and Catholicism in the 1960s.

The film follows three young women who've been carted off to be incarcerated in a workhouse for 'fallen' women that's run by nuns, where they are expected to expiate their sins by toiling in the Magdalene laundry. Their sins? Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) has 'shamed' her family by being raped by her cousin. Bernadette's (Nora-Jane Noone) good looks were deemed a bad influence to the younger girls and an unacceptable temptation to the local boys at the orphanage where she was brought up. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has just given birth out of wedlock. For that, they're condemned to working seven days a week washing the dirty linen of local businesses and institutions even while the nuns sit and count the money rolling in. Talking is disallowed. Friendships are forbidden. Beatings are commonplace.

The girls react in different ways: Bernadette is determined to escape and is brutally punished by Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) while Rose and Margaret seem to accept their fate after another girl escapes, only to be returned and beaten by her father. After several years, in different ways, all three manage to escape and regain their freedom.

Church-bashing might be du jour, but this isn't mudslinging à la Michael Moore. Even through the lens of (relative) objectivity, the nuns' ignorance of their hypocrisy is astounding, as was the Church's and society's tacit approval. The most chilling thing of all isn't that the events in the film really happened it's that the last Magdalene Laundry didn't close until 1996.

Film, as a medium, has always been primarily about entertainment. Sure, when the Lumière brothers shot onto film moving images of a train leaving the Ciotat they were creating history as well as recording for posterity, but their main goal when they showed it to contemporary audiences was to dazzle and entertain.

Films are rarely truly important but The Magdalene Sisters is.

Rating:
Summary: Magdeline Assylms were scary, and real
Review: I went to and graduated from catholic schools, and if I had ever run into any of the nuns like the ones portrayed in this movie I would no longer have questioned the existence of God. There is no forgiving supreme being of any sort in Sister Brigid's world, or in the world of any of the Magdelines. Thier world is one in which you have to earn the forgiveness of God by being a laundry slave. The girls aren't told when they will be in God's graces again, but they have to endure everything the nuns hand out. All the while they are surrounded by signs that say "God is Good" and "God is Just", but the representitives of that god are anything but.

The movie starts in a church basement during an Irish wedding reception. Margaret is raped by her cousin while everyone dances in the other room. She tells someone, and the next morning is sent away. The next girl we meet flirting with some boys on the playground of her orphanage. The mother superior is watching and comments that the girl is trouble. The last gril we meet before going into the assylum is Rose. She has just had a baby and her parents are forcing her to give it up for adoption and refusing to look at her or the baby. The next time we see these girls they are all dressed in plain brown dresses and being escorted through the Magdeline Asslym. Are those sins worthy of the punishment that follows? If there is a God in the world where I live, I hope not.

The humiliation and physical abuse that these young girls endure is absolutely horrifying. Sister Brigid's ultimate punishment is to shave the offending girls hair completely off of her head. In one of the movies more brutal scences, it is shown that it is better to sit still and not struggle. Surprisingly, not everyone there had been driven insane. Crispina, who has been there two years at the start of the film, is not so lucky. She cowers at the nuns shadows and gives favors to those she feels will help reddem her in the eyes of the Lord. She has been broken, and her only peace will come in her death.

The Catholic Church has stated this film is not based on fact of any kind, and the Pope has formally denounced the film. After watching it, I understand why no one would want to be associated with any of the people in charge of The Magdeline Assylum. Who wants to admit they were responsible for a woman of God appearing to be in her mid-40's who laughs at a yuong girl because she dosen't have large breasts? Watch the documentary titled "Sex in a Cold Climate" that is in the special features of the DVD. Women who were lucky enough to get out of the Magdeline homes talk very openly about what it was like living in them. The Catholic Church states that these women are making things up to be on film.

Much like Ingrid Bergman films, seem in a clip from "The Bells of St. Mary's",this movie truly does make one think about their religion. I believe this to be true even if you are not of the faith represented. How could a forgiving god sentance a woman to die in a laundry prison because she had a baby out of wedlock?

Please watch this film with someone else. I felt the need to discuss points made, and maybe you will also.

Rating:
Summary: "What have we done to deserve this?"
Review: It is shocking to watch a movie that is based on a true story and that shows the events this one shows. In Ireland, until the end of the twentieth century, there were "nun schools" all over the country. Girls were abandoned there by their families or tutors entering a world of slavery, having to work doing laundry for outside contractors and being treated like prisoners in a labor farm. The director, Peter Mullan, did an outstanding job in conveying to the public the conditions in which the girls spent their hours, as well as depicting the eroding effect the situation had on their hopes, ambitions, and even basic personality traits.

The tale focuses on three female adolescents, who end up in the infamous reformatory for different reasons. Margaret is raped by her cousin on a family wedding, and when minutes after the fact she tells a friend, the "secret" is shared with everyone. Her father cannot stand the shame and hauls her off to her miserable destination. Bernadette is happy living in an orphanage, but she is also beautiful and enjoys the attention she is getting from the boys in the neighborhood. The director of the orphanage starts to get concerned and sends her away. Rose is a single mother who has just given birth to a beautiful baby. Her parents bring in a priest to convince her to give the baby up in adoption, and once she surrenders to their wishes, her reward is to pay a long visit to the nuns.

The motto of the Magdalene sisters is to deny pleasures and seek cleansing through non-stop working. Moreover, they force the girls to pray every night, and the discipline is worse than in the strictest military school. What makes things even scarier is that the sisters held adult women as "prisoners" too, since these individuals have lost all lucidity and have grown used to their way of living. Of course, while the recluses eat disgusting food, the nuns feast on delicacies and enjoy the money earned through the effort of others.

Most of the aspects of the movie are outstanding and the experience is ultimately enjoyable, but it is hard to swallow some of the things that happen to these girls. There are two performances that in my opinion shine well above the rest. Geraldine McEwan is so convincing in her role of Sister Bridget, that one hates her right away. Nora-Jane Noone plays Bernadette and does so very effectively, creating ambiguous feelings towards this character. Finally, the music in this production is worth mentioning and deserves high praise, with the song playing during the wedding in which Margaret is raped, being its best representative.

Rating:
Summary: Watching these horrors made me appreciate my own life
Review: This Irish film is based on the true stories of young women who, in the 1970s, were sent to a Magdalene home. There were many of these homes in Ireland then, run by nuns where "fallen women" were sent to repent their sins. And the sins were as simple as being too pretty, or having young man attack you or giving birth to an illegitimate baby. Once there, some of them stayed for a lifetime.

The abuse from the nuns was unlimited. The women, called penitents, were prisoners, forced to labor in a the laundries run by the nuns. They worked six days a week from dawn to dusk. There was no recreation, constant harassment and humiliation. They were beaten for any infraction of a rule and had their hair shaved for disobedience. And even if they behaved themselves they were subject to the nuns' cruelty. In one of the most chilling scenes, the penitents are forced to stand in a line, nude, in front of the nuns. The nuns giggle and laugh and make fun of the naked women's bodies, taunting them about such things as size of breasts or degree of hairiness.

The film traces three women who were forced into the home as teenagers It was awful. Yet, as a film, it was perfect inasmuch as I forgot about the film techniques and just simply identified with the women and forgot they were acting and that this was a movie. By the end of the film, the women had spent four years in the home and each one has managed to get away. I should have been happy about this but couldn't help thinking about all those who never got away.

The film is very upsetting. And yet I recommend it. If nothing else, those of us who never experienced such horrors will appreciate some aspects of our own lives that we take for granted.

**

The film is based on a documentary, "Sex in a Cold Climate, " that was aired on Irish television in 1998. The DVD included the entire 50 minutes of documentary. This was even more upsetting that the fictional film because this was real. It featured women, now in the 60s or older, telling their horror stories of having spent many years with the Magdelenes. One women had her 10-month old nursing baby torn from her arms. She's spent a lifetime searching for this child and finally reunited with him many years later. Another woman was sent to the home simply because she was pretty. After she got out she had an unsuccessful marriage because she never got over the lessons taught by the nuns, which shaped her view of men. They talked about feeling unworthy and how their experience warped their lives forever. It was chilling.

If you can stomach it, try to see the film and as well as the documentary on the DVD. You will never look at the world quite in the same way again.

Rating:
Summary: The Emerald Isle badly tarnished in the Magdalene Sisters
Review: Ireland, the land of Saints and Sinners, focuses on sin without redemption in this stark portrayal of the injustice done to women in the Ireland of the 20th Century.

In the most glaring case of injustice dramatized, a young woman who has been raped at a wedding party is sent to a Magdalene House by her father. These houses, located in various parts of Ireland, are places where women young and old are incarcerated without trial and forced to work doing laundry from dawn to dusk. The women are treated like slaves for "the good of their souls" by nuns who take a sadistic pleasure in humiliating the women, beating them mercilessly, and frightening them with the fear of everlasting damnation.

Few women escape from their torment. The ones who try are often returned to servitude by their own families and then are beaten and have their head shaved in the most brutal and demeaning fashion as an object lesson to the rest of the prisoners. This dreadful practice of involuntary servitude continued until 1996 when the last Magdalene House was finally shut down.

Included with the DVD is a three part documentary called "Sex in a Cold Climate." While not as dramatic or brutal as the film, the point is clearly made that 30,000 women were subjected to a glaring miscarriage of justice. Ireland is portrayed as a backward country with a Middle Age mentality.

Some of the priests shown in the film abuse the young women sexually and use the confessional to reinforce the misguided notion of "the penitents" that they have brought their harsh fate on themselves and what is being done to them is being done for their own good.

This film deserves the high praise it has received. Its point of view may be biased against the religious and clergy of Ireland, but this bias is supported by the dreadful treatment of real people who have testified against the Magdalene Houses and their proprietors.

Ireland may be the setting for this film, but in the end, our consciousness is raised and sensitized to the plight of women everywhere who suffer in male dominated cultures often suported by unwitting women who are duped into believing the lies taught to them by the male establishment. Few people will be unmoved by this stark portrayal of the evil done to women until very recently in what we will now find hard to call "The Emerald Isle."

Rating:
Summary: Suffice It To Say, The Church and State Had Too Much Power.
Review: "The Magdalene Sisters" is a fact-based account of three young Irish women who were imprisoned in a Magdalene Laundry in Dublin in 1964. The original purpose of the ten Magdalene Laundries that were established in Ireland in the 19th century was to reform prostitutes. Women were imprisoned by the State and Church and expected to do penance for their sins through hard work and prayer. By 1930, instead of being populated by former prostitutes, Ireland's Magdalene Laundries were occupied primarily by unwed mothers whose families had rejected them. An estimated 30,000 Irish women were detained in the Laundries during the 20th century, until the last one closed in 1996, and were used as a slave labor force, working from dawn until dusk to turn a profit for the Order that administered the Laundries.

"The Magdalene Sisters" tells the stories of Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who is sent away from her home after being raped at a family wedding, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), whose caretakers at the orphanage where she grew up banish her to the Laundry to prevent her good looks from causing any trouble, and Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who is scorned by her family after bearing a child out of wedlock. These three teenagers arrive at the Magdalene asylum at the same time and together bear its abuses and indignities over the course of years. The three lead actresses give fine performances. Geraldine McEwan and Eileen Walsh give stand-out performances as Sister Bridget, chief administrator of the asylum, and Crispina, a mentally challenged inmate, respectively. The film does portray the Irish Catholic Church in a bad light -at least the small part of it that we see. But the Church fares no worse than the government that supported the imprisonment of women who had committed no crime or, even more appalling, the self-righteous, hideously self-absorbed parents who delivered their children into imprisonment and slavery because they were afraid of what the neighbors would think. "The Magdalene Sisters" presents interesting intertwined stories about a very unfortunate slice of Irish history.

The DVD: This disc's single bonus feature is the inaptly titled 50-minute documentary "Sex in a Cold Climate". This is an original British documentary film which inspired writer/director Peter Mullan to write "The Magdalene Sisters". The documentary features the stories of three women who were confined in Magdalene Laundries in their youth, and one woman who grew up in an orphanage that adjoined one of the Laundries. It's unclear to me whether these women were the basis for the characters in the "The Magdalene Sisters" or not. Their stories are similar enough to those in the movie to make me think so, yet they differ in timing and details. For the feature film, subtitles are available in French and Spanish, and captions are available in English. Dubbing is available in French. Four unavoidable "public service" spots precede the film, narrated by movie stars and aimed at women with anorexia, alcoholism, self-esteem, and spousal abuse problems. What will we have to sit through next?

Rating:
Summary: 'You Are Not A Man Of God!'
Review: The Magdalene Sisters is one of the best films I have ever seen, one that has deeply touched and moved me like few films managed to do, certainly at least in the last decade.
I love the film for two reasons,
Firstly, because it is a very brave and bold criticism of the religious establishment's hypocrisies and corruption, that very few filmmakers addressed. The fact that the story of the Magdalene Sisters happened for real makes it more outrageous and its exposure more poignant for the changed sensitivities of the twenty first century man and woman regardless of their own denomination or faith.
The second reason why I love the film so much, is simply because it is extremely well directed, scripted and acted. No matter how real or interesting the plot is, the viewer would connect and appreciate it much less had the storytelling, writing, and performances been not up to standard, but most definitely actor turned director Peter Mullan with his wonderful cast managed to remain totally faithful and sympathetic to their subject matter with no unnecessary sentimentality, and as a result producing a masterpiece of gritty realism, and a shout of defiance at the overbearingly repressive regimes of religious establishments.
The story of the Magdalene Sisters is tragic:
There was a time in Ireland, not so long ago, when 'fallen' women, those who 'sin' and have babies out of the 'sacred' wedlock,and even those who are simply suspected of harboring any sexual thoughts were sent to a prison-like place run by the Magdalene sisters to cleanse their sins and 'redirect' them to the true path, the only accepted path of the church, not unlike Medieval times.
The sad fact is that these women had no other place to go after their own parents banished them in 'shame' for what they have done or were thinking of doing!!!
The place where the women slave all day to do the laundry for nearby institutions becomes indeed like a slave/concentration camp, at the head of which a sadistic and mentally unbalanced mother superior presides.
The women endure hardships and cruelty beyond imagination, and they are humiliated, scorned, and dehumanized all in the name of the 'Lord'!
But of course, the place also hides some sinister secrets, a fornicating priest who was accidentally caught in the act, and a mean and ambitiously rich mother superior who goes mad with rage looking for the key to her safe..
The fate of these women is mainly told through the individual stories of four women, and four brilliant actresses, Anne Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy and Eileen Walsh, while the mother superior/Warden is played to perfection by the great Geraldine McEwan whose reminded me a bit of Nurse Fletcher.
There are so many very powerful scenes in the film, but three have firmly stuck in my mind,
After the priest's act is secretly exposed between the women, and at an open air reception, Crispina/Eileen Walsh suddenly stands up and repeats many times in a frustrated, angry tone and as if in a trance: 'You are not a man of God!' over and over and over again..
A second scene will probably not be out of place in any concentration camp movie,(it slightly reminded me of the degradations of Pasolini's Salo) when all the women are lined up totally naked and are mocked and humiliated by two nuns, comparing and laughing at the women's bodies!
A third scene ,the last one in the film, we see Nora-Jane Noone, now finally out (I will not reveal how..you have to watch the movie), and dressed conservatively, hair in a bun, and nervously waits for the bus, looking over her shoulder, slightly paranoid that people might know her secret, and right in front of her, two nuns are sitting. At first she avoids eye contact and is clearly agitated..but then with a show of defiance and the ultimate statement of the film, she let her hair loose and looks at them straight in the eye, a look of fury mixed with confidence! Wow!
The Magdalene Sisters is therefore a masterpiece that should be in the collection of any one who,like myself, love good cinema, and abhors the injustices and hypocrisies that these brave women have faced just for the biggest sin they have committed by being simply 'humans'.

Rating:
Summary: truth must be told
Review: As a lapsed Catholic I am glad to say that this movie came out to expose the faults of constipated and old-world thinking that rules in the vatican. It goes to show that we must remove the old way of thinking and the complacent orthodoxy that plagues the catholic church. There are many good people in this denomination who serve with love and compassion.

It has been one week since I've seen this movie and I still think about it every day. I pray for the 30,000 victims of this institution and the victims of abuse today.

I would like to correct some misconceptions proposed by a viewer who posted on this website: The implication of recalcitrance on behalf of the Protestants in Northern Ireland to integrate into an united Ireland due to "potential" subjugation to Catholicism (and therefore forced to the treatment in this movie). This is a very obtuse and ignorant comment to make. History has shown the imperialism of English rule on Ireland over hundreds of years forced it succumb to poverty and desperation - religion was a spiritual outlet(catholicism); the Protestant penal laws promulgated onto all catholic irish denied catholics education, land ownership, representation, practice of their religion under penalty of death for hundreds of years (forcing the Irish to embrace their denomination closer), the forced/attempted conversion of catholic men, women and children under the weight of starvation (due to multiple famines that starved millions of people) by wealthy protestant landowners, etc. The Protestants in Northern Ireland have a fear of backlashes and loss of wealth and political power (much like the white landowners in South Africa) due to hundreds of years of wrong-doing. The situation is a thousand-fold more complicated issue than can be issued into the previously published statement.

The fact that the Magdalene Laundries existed for so long clearly places blood on the hands of all that allowed these to exist. I hope at some point they fell guilt before their maker as to to atrocities they committed against Irish women. I harrowing tale not unlike slavery in the USA.

Rating:
Summary: A "must see" movie
Review: Is this movie anti-Catholic? Not in my opinion. I think that it is anti-cruelty, no matter which group of people, religious or otherwise, is inflicting it. Power corrupts, and power fueled by religious fervor is the worst kind of corruption because these people use God's imprimatur as a justification for their behavior.

That being said, Mullan did not show even one of the religious people in this film having even a shred of humanity, which was probably a mistake.

I never knew about the cruel and inhumane Magdalene laundries in Ireland, which lasted from the late 1800s until 1996, amazingly enough. As much as I appreciated this movie, I also appreciated the original documentary(an extra on the DVD) on which this movie was based. It was hard to believe that this kind of a place had existed into modern times. The feeling of the movie was that of a place in the dark times of Charles Dickens, even though it took place late in the 20th century.

The evil that was perpetrated by the Magdalene sisters is truly appalling. The poor women given over to their cruelty got a life sentence with no hope of appeal. They had absolutely no civil rights - they were just dumped into these "sanctuaries" for imagined or minor infractions, usually sexual.

This is a movie that is painful and is religiously controversial....but one that should be seen by everyone.