Holding Back

Turnabout is fair play: Peter Mullan in <i>The Magdalene Sisters</i>, partly inspired by his Catholic upbringing.

Turnabout is fair play: Peter Mullan in The Magdalene Sisters, partly inspired by his Catholic upbringing.

The Magdalene Sisters’ brutal tale of Catholic repression is still easier than the reality, says director Peter Mullan.

by Sam Adams

As I walk into the bar of the Penn’s View Hotel, Peter Mullan is out of his chair, twisting his torso from side to side; in T-shirt and nylon shorts, he looks like he might be limbering up for a run. And indeed, Mullan does get pretty animated while talking about The Magdalene Sisters, his second feature as a director, though he manages to stay in his seat.

Mullan has good reason to be exercised. Magdalene deals fictionally with a particularly dirty secret of the Catholic Church of Ireland. For decades, until as recently as 1996, girls perceived to have transgressed the church's morality were sent to work in Magdalene "laundries," which were little more than forced-labor camps. Held against their will (though often brainwashed into believing otherwise), the girls washed clothing in enforced silence, day after day, as penance for their perceived wrongs, though sometimes just to avoid shame or even inconvenience to their families. In the film, one girl is sent to the Magdalene after she's raped by her cousin, while another, an orphan, is sent off merely for being pretty enough to draw the attention of local boys. (Both cases are based on real women, drawn from the documentary that first inspired Mullan, Sex in a Cold Climate.)

Not surprisingly, the film, condemned in a Vatican newspaper as "an angry and rancorous provocation," has infuriated the Catholic Church. In Venice, where it premiered, two priests stationed themselves outside the entrance to the cinema and videotaped people going in, warning them that they were committing a sin by watching the film.

In America, Mullan says, the reaction has been surprisingly different. "People just want to talk," says the Glasgow native in a thick burr. "I do Q&As every night with the film in different places and there's not been one that's lasted less than an hour." Mullan came prepared to go on the defensive, but instead has found most audiences joining in the movie's sense of outrage. "I thought I'd get more flak over here, and it's not happened."

Considering the brutish lugs Mullan has played in such movies as Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe -- not to mention Magdalene itself, where he plays the abusive father of a Magdalene girl -- his ferocious intelligence comes almost as a shock. As articulate as he is passionate about his subject matter, Mullan managed to strike a balance between visceral outrage and thoughtful provocation.

As upsetting as Magdalene might seem -- a retarded girl is driven to the brink of suicide; an attempted escape is punished by a haircut so violently administered that the girl's face is caked with dried blood -- Mullan assures that it's a pale reflection of the reality. "To be honest, the [Magdalene] survivors think it's too soft," he admits. "The film that would be the most accurate portrayal couldn't be made, because the reality would always be worse."

Instead, Mullan tried to take "two steps back" and "subvert the audience expectation of a prison picture." He could have broadsided his audience with the worst stories of life in the Magdalenes, but for Mullan, "there's a big difference between truth and reality. If something's real, that doesn't make it truthful. The pursuit of truth's an artistic pursuit -- it's an abstract, and it's farcical to think that realities are concrete. Realities are subjective, so you as the artist have to be honest and say, here's my reality. Here's my version."

Not surprisingly, Mullan's version includes plenty of room for astonishing performances, many from girls who'd never acted before. (Nora-Jane Noone, who plays the spirited Bernadette, had only performed in the chorus of Grease.) Mullan couldn't be happier with the results. "There's a purity in the acting, more than any other aspect of the film, that will last. I'm confident 30 years from now, I could watch it and the acting will still blow me away; it's so nonmannered and open and honest that you can't help but be drawn into these characters." Mullan's approach to helping his young cast through the film's dark moments was drawn from his instincts as an actor, and given shape by his experience watching Loach. "It was just making them feel confident, that there's no responsibility," Mullan explains. "A director's job on any film set is to make it feel the opposite of what it is, which is very high-pressure, money's involved, things can go wrong, blah blah blah. You've got to create a pretense that it's all fun, and it's not very important, except in the sense that we all want to do as good a job as possible."

Of course, Mullan knew at the time that his subject matter was important, and was wary enough of potential resistance to film in Scotland instead of Ireland. But while the Catholic Church initially bristled (thus giving the film more publicity than it could ever have dreamed of), Mullan is beginning to see signs of an about-face.

"They now want to contact me, to contact the women, to see if they can move things forward," he says. "The Vatican's completely changed its tune since the film opened, and I got an apology from the Sisters of Mercy three days ago. It's only the League of Decency, those two guys who type a lot, who are running around banging the old drum, and I'm sure they'll change their tune pretty quick."

The Magdalene Sisters opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse.