THE MAGDALENE SISTERS [ 1/2]
Nasty habits. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated R (vi olence, nudity, language). At the Lincoln Plaza and Loews Village.
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BERNADETTE, a heroine of Peter Mullan’s “The Magda lene Sisters” – which has been condemned by the pope and other Catholic officials – is a sweet young woman with an inviting smile who likes to flirt with the boys in the schoolyard. Nothing more – just flirt.
For this “sin,” she is spirited off to “live with the sisters.”
To be precise, she is shut away in a Catholic church-condoned Magdalene asylum, where women of all ages work seven days a week, without pay, in a commercial laundry that brings in big bucks for the nuns.
Bernadette is not alone. In the mid-part of the 20th century, thousands of women were imprisoned in similar asylums all across Ireland because somebody found them “disreputable.”
Smile at the wrong person, and you’ll wash other people’s underwear for the rest of your life.
Amazingly, the last asylum didn’t shutter its doors until 1996.
Director-writer Mullins – an actor known for “My Name Is Joe” and “Trainspotting” – focuses on one asylum, with special attention paid to four women based on real-life people.
Besides Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), there’s Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who is punished because she had the nerve to be raped by a drunken cousin at a wedding; Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who had a baby out-of-wedlock; and Crispina (Eileen Walsh), a mildly retarded poor soul who is sexually abused by a priest at the asylum and ends up in a mental hospital.
The place is run by sadistic old Sister Bridget (a grand Geraldine McEwan), who would have made a great prison warden in an old Jimmy Cagney flick.
“Here you can redeem yourself and save yourself from eternal damnation,” she tells new arrivals.
She’s nasty as they come. Talk out of turn, and you’re likely to be whipped or have your hair sheared off. Or worse.
For Christmas, the nuns go all out to be nice: Each inmate gets an orange on her bed and a chance to watch Ingrid Bergman’s nun sob in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” as Sister Bridget tries to act human.
The cast is amazing – two of the lead actresses are first-timers – as we watch the asylum take innocent young women and turn them into beaten-down people, old before their time.
Mullan triggers all your emotions – anger, sorrow, pity, disgust, shame. And once he gets hold of you, he won’t let go.
The story may get a tad sappy and contrived – one girl is freed by her brother on Christmas Day – but you’re hooked.
You’ll walk away amazed at the heartlessness of the people running the asylums and wondering how such a gruesome practice could have existed into the late 20th century.
