By Eli Ungar

Peter Mullan's second feature, The Magdalene Sisters, has won both the Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Film Festival and the European Union Media Prize for Best Film at Cannes in 2003. In spite of these awards and the film's excellent critical reception, The Magdalene Sisters has initiated a controversy in the Catholic world. Both the Vatican and the Catholic League have condemned it as being "anti-Catholic," although others of this faith, most notably the publishers of Catholic journal Conscience and the group Catholics for Free Choice, have praised the film.

The Magdalene Sisters is the story of four Catholic girls in Ireland who are sent to the Magdalene convents in 1964. These convents were real places where Irish Catholic girls, deemed by their parents to be sexual in any way, were imprisoned. Once in the convents, the girls were forced to wash laundry all day long without pay as penance for their "sins." They were kept within the confines of these convent-laundries indefinitely and were abused, emotionally, physically, and sexually, by the resident nuns and visiting priests. Some 30,000 women are thought to have lived this nightmare and the last of the convent-laundries was only closed in 1996. The film follows the struggles of Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), Rose (Dorothy Duff), Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), and Crispina (Eileen Walsh) as they face the abusive tyrant Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan).

In many ways, The Magdalene Sisters is a prison drama. Sister Bridget serves as the "evil warden" and much of the narrative is spent following the girls through a series of ill-fated escape attempts. However, due to some brilliant filmmaking and a particularly riveting performance by Nora-Jane Noone, this film succeeds in avoiding the usual prison-flick clichés and becomes a study in how these different characters change in their extreme environment. In a wonderfully subtle scene, a door in the wall of the convent is left open by mistake and Margaret steps through it into the outside world. She succeeds in flagging a car down and just as she is about to escape with its puzzled driver, she returns to the convent.

This scene, in its own quiet way, works wonders in exposing what it means to be in a religious prison. One of the reasons that religion continues to be such a powerful institution is that it draws on all aspects of the human psyche. Margaret's choice to return to the hell that was the Magdalene convent serves to illustrate the fact that her confinement was not merely physical in nature.

In another powerful sequence, Bernadette is caught trying to escape and as punishment, Sister Bridget violently cuts off her hair. Bernadette struggles and her scalp begins to bleed against the sharp scissors. Mullan places the camera at her hairline and we see a Christ-like image of blood dripping down her forehead. This is Mullan's criticism of the Church at its best: He uses the image of the crown of thorns to show that these girls were crucified by the Church's own clergy.

The power of The Magdalene Sisters comes from its use of narrative filmmaking to get viewers to empathize with the girls. This could have very easily been a documentary film, complete with teary-eyed interviews and eyewitness accounts of the horrors that surely took place at this virtual prison camp.

However, Mullan chose to create a narrative piece and herein lies the film's biggest strength as well as its greatest weakness. The use of narrative places this story in the transcendent realm of archetypal storytelling. In this realm, one needs to carefully craft all characters to reflect the extra-temporal truth of who they represent in the real world. Were Mullan to have shot a documentary on the subject, it would be clear that he was investigating a specific time in the history of the Irish Catholic Church. As a narrative piece, the film shows a lack of finesse in its portrayal of Catholic authority figures. They are portrayed as one-dimensional villains.

I understand the legitimacy of the anger that filters through every frame of this film as well as the importance of telling this story, particularly in today's era of church scandal. However, these motives do not excuse such an oversimplified portrayal of these characters. For there not to be a single positive image of a Catholic authority figure throughout the whole film is tantamount to saying that the Catholic religion has a dehumanizing effect on its strictest adherents. One may be of such an opinion, but it does not make for good storytelling.

It is this issue that keeps The Magdalene Sisters from being a truly excellent film. I refuse to believe that there wasn't a single compassionate soul in the Magdalene Convents. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, this film's merits outweigh its shortcomings and in an age where many in the clergy of the Catholic Church fancy themselves above the law, the recovered voices of these victims of abuse ring loud and clear.

Image courtesy of Miramax