Last week our new Prime Minister took office. When he introduced his cabinet half of the Ministers were women. When asked why that was important to him he responded with a quip that took off on social media: 'because it is 2015'. It was a good counterpoint to the movie we saw last night - Suffragette.
Suffragette takes place in 1912 and 1913, when the 10-year-old Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep in a cameo although she receives top billing), had intensified its tactics to include hunger strikes and arson attacks. By the time Suffragette opens, Pankhurst has gone into hiding and the movement is being carefully tracked by the authorities.
The film brings the dramatically stratified world of Suffragette to life. From the outset, the film is suffused with bustling atmosphere and a heavy sense of dread. (The director is less adroit with action sequences, such as an unconvincing police riot that ensues after Pankhurst speaks).
In fact, Suffragette would suffer from being fatally dreary and dutiful were it not for the central performance by Carey Mulligan, who plays a reticent laundry worker whose consciousness is raised by a feisty colleague, played by Anne-Marie Duff.
As the soft-spoken Maud Watts, Mulligan is, quite simply, a revelation. Her preternaturally expressive face conveys volumes in just one baleful look. Mulligan delivers a performance that is simultaneously meek and musical. Whether she is confronting an uncomprehending husband (Ben Whishaw), an abusive boss (Geoff Bell) or a manipulative police inspector (Brendan Gleeson), her journey is never less than fleet and sure-footed — whatever the repercussions.
The film might easily be subtitled, The Radicalization of Maud. Caught up in a window-smashing street riot orchestrated by suffragettes, she initially has little interest in the movement, but soon starts to see it as a path that could lead to equality of pay, and safety from sexual harassment in the workplace.
Called at the last minute to testify before Parliament, the sad-eyed, exhausted Maud turns a showstopping scene into a quiet, deeply touching moment when she suggests, with heartbreaking simplicity, that there might be “another way of living this life.”
Even when Suffragette flirts with melodrama, as long as Mulligan is on-screen — and especially when she is joined by Duff — Suffragette is comes alive.
The plot builds to a grievous climax, based on the real-life story of activist Emily Wilding Davison, who threw herself in front of a horse owned by King George V at a race in 1913.
The film’s greatest achievement is that it gives a full-blooded picture of a struggle that is still going forth in some corners of the world today.
At the end of the movie a long list of countries and when they granted women the right to vote ran along the screen. Canada was missing from the list. For those who want to know - 1919 for Federal elections.
The audience for the film was predominantly women. At the end of the film they burst into applause . . . something one doesn't experience at the movies very often any longer.
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