Unearthing the church's secret shame

Peter Mullan's controversial The Magdalene Sisters exposes abuses by Catholic nuns

Before Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last summer, the Vatican church issued a biting indictment through its newspaper, Osservatore Romano, calling the movie an "angry and rancorous provocation... 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," adding that the film was "incautiously allowed to pass as a work of art at the Venice festival."
You can imagine the outrage when the film ended up winning the coveted Golden Lion.
The Magdalene Sisters tells the story of four girls in Ireland who are sent to the Magdalene laundries where women accused of sexual sins (being raped, flirting with boys, and having a baby while unmarried) were banished to a lifetime of servitude during the 20th century. This is the Ireland where 30,000 women were imprisoned in Magdalene laundries, literally washing the country's dirty linen (clerical and lay), their babies taken for largely undocumented adoption by Catholic families at home and in the U.S., their exhausted bodies laid to final rest in unmarked graves, until the last of these church-run institutions closed in 1996. Set in 1964, the film follows Crispina (Eileen Walsh) and Rose (Dorothy Duffy) who both gave birth to children out of wedlock; orphaned Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) who tends to be very flirtatious with boys; and Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) whose offense was that she got raped by her cousin at a wedding and made the mistake of telling her family about it.
When the announcement came down that The Magdalene Sisters was handed the Venice festival's top honour, Italy's Catholic Church immediately issued a scathing statement. "This film does not tell the truth; it brings dishonour on the festival and risks disqualifying it," said Cardinal Tonini of the Vatican. "Considerations of aesthetic value alone are not enough. I'm amazed no one has posed the problem of historical accuracy."
One of the most vehement critics of the Venice award was Valerio Riva, a member of the administrative board of the Biennale arts council, which controls the festival. "I'm in complete disagreement," fumed Riva. "The award to Mullan is a provocation. I'm highly suspicious of claims that the Catholic Church is worse than the Taliban. This is an incorrect propaganda film and the director is comparable to Leni Riefenstahl."
"The people who honour this film have done so solely for its anti-Catholic content," echoed Gianni Baget Bozzo, a prominent Catholic intellectual and conservative politician. "Evidently, that's where its fascination lies since there is such strong anti-Christian sentiment today."
Perhaps giving the prize even more sting, the Venice festival was overhauled by Italy's right-wing, Silvio Berlusconi-led government precisely to avoid embarrassing, anti-establishment publicity, an irony pointed out by Catholic media figure Andrea Piersanti. "It's paradoxical that the most coveted award went to the film that most divided critics and audiences," he commented. "It's a bizarre signal that the first festival of the center-right government has chosen to honour a professedly anticlerical film."
So Scottish-born Mullan, a respected actor (My Name is Joe) and director (Orphans), was able to reach his ultimate goal: to bring his film to as wide an audience as possible. With this much controversy, that's a sure thing. Although the film had no U.S. distributor when it won the award, Miramax bought it for an incredibly cheap $600,000 (U.S.). The film has since won the Discovery Award at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival; the Audience Golden Reel Award at 2002 Ljubljana International Film Festival; and the Best Picture award at the 2003 Newport Film Festival.
Although the Magdalene Asylums have been subjects of an award-winning play (Eclipsed), a Joni Mitchell song ("The Magdalene Laundries") and a British documentary (Sex in a Cold Climate), what happened behind the walls of these asylums remains largely unknown. In his research Mullan set off to talk to former inmates of the asylums, but found himself against a wall of resistance and silence from those who weren't eager to reveal the past. At one point he tried to put an advertisement in several Irish papers asking for eyewitness accounts, but was told they couldn't print it because it was too controversial.
He eventually managed to gather enough documentation and witnesses to put together a script. Although the film's characters are fictional, they're a combination of several inmates. To add further authenticity to the film, Mullan cast Phyllis McMahon, a former nun in a Magdalene Asylum, as Sister Augusta.
"It was Phyllis who made for me an absolutely key statement," Mullan says. "I asked her: 'What went wrong in the asylums? How did it happen that the nuns did these things?' And she answered, 'Absence of doubt. We had no doubts about what we did.'"
If Mullan had any doubts about the veracity of his depiction of what went on in the Magdalene asylums, they disappeared following one of his first private screenings of the film. Upon viewing The Magdalene Sisters, former inmate Mary-Jo McDonagh, who was interred at the Magdalene laundry in Galway, turned to Mullan and said: "It was worse, much worse than what you see. I don't like to say it, but the film is soft on the nuns."
The Magdalene Sisters is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2003-08-10
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3034