#The Magdalene Sisters

[anamon-book]

マグダレンの祈り Garden Cinema Express VOL.101 ガーデンシネマ・イクスプレス第101号 ヘラルド・エンタープライズ株式会社 監督：ピーター・ミュラン／出演：ノラ＝ジェーン・ヌーン、アンヌ＝マリー・ダフ、ドロシー・ダフィ ほか

[denimbex1986]

'**** Cillian Murphy headlines Small Things Like These, an understated drama that’s miniature in scale but not ambition.

Opening the Berlin Film Festival, it arrives just weeks before Murphy heads to the Academy Awards to compete for his first Oscar – for his role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

The two films couldn’t be more different, despite both being anchored by the consummate Murphy’s un-showy presence.

Set in 1985, he plays Bill Furlong, who runs a small coal business in County Wicklow, Ireland. Married to Eileen (Eileen Walsh), he’s a father of five daughters – the quiet one in this all-female household.

Set over Christmastime, his children are naturally excitable, but emotions are swelling inside Bill. When one of his offspring asks what he used to get for Christmas, he replies that he once got a jigsaw. Once. It's a heartbreaking admission, one that allows the film to flash back to a sparse childhood.

At one point, we see the young Bill given a hot water bottle as a present; the disappointment etched into his face speaks volumes.

When his wife asks him what he’d like, he suggests David Copperfield, the classic Charles Dickens novel. And indeed, there is something distinctly Dickensian about this story, where poverty seems to exist on every street corner. Quite literally, in one scene, where Bill sees a small barefoot child lapping from a bowl in the road like an animal.

Adapted from the 2020 novel by Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These really is a character study, as Bill’s childhood trauma begins to catch up with him.

The film’s director, Tim Mielants, who previously filmed Murphy in several episodes of BBC show Peaky Blinders, misses no opportunity to train the lens on Murphy’s face, notably when he mournfully stares out of a rain-lashed window. Shots like these speak volumes of his under-the-surface turmoil.

The film really takes hold when Bill delivers coal to the local convent, run by Sister Mary (Emily Watson, who expertly essays a servant of God you simply wouldn’t want to cross).

Bill encounters a young girl named Sarah (Zara Devlin), who has been locked in the convent’s coal shed, and is in desperate need of help. Without ever really explicitly detailing it, the film alludes to the ‘Magdalene laundries’, Catholic institutions that became notorious for exploiting women who were admitted there, often simply because they had fallen pregnant out of wedlock.

It’s not the first time this has been exposed on film, notably in Peter Mullan’s 2002 Golden Lion-winning film The Magdalene Sisters. But while that was a full and frank look at this horrifying practice, Mielants’s movie is deliberately more subtle.

Gradually, we learn that Bill was the son of an unwed teenage mother who escaped the laundries, making his sympathy towards Sarah understandable. Rarely, though, does the film slip into melodrama; expect no grandstanding from Murphy or his co-stars here.

Scripted by playwright Enda Walsh (whose play Disco Pigs was previously adapted on screen, and gave Murphy an early, show-stopping role), Small Things Like These really scores highly in the way it’s been shot.

Mielants and his cinematographer Frank van den Eeden beautifully capture rural Ireland in the mid-'80s, in a way that suggests how little has changed since Bill was a boy in the 1950s.

With much of the film shot around dusk or nighttime, even the sight of carol singers in the street comes with an eerie tint.

At the heart, of course, is Murphy, who gives a performance of great stillness and control. It’s unlikely to catch Hollywood’s eye in the way Oppenheimer has, but it’s another reminder of what a fine and nuanced actor he is.'

[scaredbi]

Film Diary

11/19/22 (first viewing) - The Magdalene Sisters (2002) Dir. & Written by Peter Mullan

[silentangell95]

Филми и сериали: Февруари

[tuinendraws]

Been playing Pentiment recently. Great game!

[burgerbingbootbettuce]

Getting into the habit of drawing again starting with some pentiment characters

[mazurga]

A chance

[annabelle--cane]

I think that. the gospels have too many ffucking marys.

[skipp3r]

My three absolute favourite nuns of all time. I couldn’t resist drawing them in my style

[kingfugue]

pentiment is the game of all time

[denimbex1986]

'Anyone looking to debate the limits of progress should cast an eye on 1980s Ireland. As a generation born in revolution and civil war moved from farms to towns, a middle class emerged. Some people had televisions; if they were good, some of their kids had Levi’s jeans. As certain things loosened, the Catholic church’s grip on most aspects of Irish life seemed to only grow tighter. Between 1922 and 1996, and aided by a callow state, the church was responsible for imprisoning tens of thousands of women (mostly young single mothers who couldn’t afford the child) into what was essentially indentured servitude. In these “laundries,” women worked seven days a week and weren’t allowed to leave. Their babies were taken from them and sold for adoption, or worse. Around 1,600 women died. The number of babies is estimated to be in the thousands.

The awful tragedy of those events and the way the nation wilfully looked away have inspired many writers and filmmakers––Peter Mullen in 2002 (The Magdalene Sisters), Joe Murtagh last year (The Woman in The Wall)––but few to the same acclaim as Claire Keegan’s softly stated, powerfully evocative 2020 novella Small Things Like These, which now gets the big screen treatment in Tim Mielants’ faithful adaptation. Starring a dogged Cillian Murphy and adapted by the playwright Enda Walsh, it premiered as the curtain-raiser of the 74th Berlin Film Festival––risking faintest of praise, it is the best film to do so in years.

Focusing on a coal merchant named Bill Furlong (Murphy), Keegan’s story approaches the Laundry’s horrors through the eyes of a man whose own mother only narrowly avoided them. That formative act of kindness—her employer, a widow named Mrs Wilson (played in flashback by Michelle Fairley), not only allowed Bill and his mother to carry on under her roof, but also helped raise Furlong after his mother’s untimely death—has instilled him with a fundamental kindness and protective spirit. Not least, it seems, for vulnerable kids: in an early scene, Mielants shows Furlong stopping his truck in the middle of the road to give a boy he knows some loose change. Furlong knows this will draw the scorn of his wife, the pragmatic Eileen (Eileen Furlong), with whom he has five daughters who are well-clothed and fed thanks to Furlong’s work. This involves delivering coal around the town of New Ross in the southeast of Ireland––a decent business it seems, even in trying times. One day, while out doing the rounds, he finds himself inside the doors of the local laundry and witnesses things that upset his equilibrium. In the spirit of Keegan’s sparse prose, we should probably not give much else away.

The challenge of adapting comes in finding ways to bring more subtle elements to screen without relying too much on exposition. While mostly succeeding in this, Melliant and Walsh use flashbacks to show Bill’s younger years––an understandable addition, though Small Things loses considerable steam sans Murphy’s presence. With notable patience, Mielants (who directed Murphy in six episodes of Peaky Blinders) allows the darkness to gradually seep in.

Born in a town outside Brussels, Mielants deserves credit for tackling such a shameful part of Irish history: Small Things gets at the lingering traumas with a clear sense of time and place. DP Frank Van den Eeden captures the overcast South East in not entirely unkind greys and browns. On Furlong’s rounds, we get a lovely recurring shot from on top of his battered delivery truck that gives an overview of the landscape. We also start understanding everything we need to know about him: the way he conducts his business, his generosity to his employees, the importance of the convent’s business to his livelihood, not to mention his family. As a barwoman informs him, “There’s only a wall separating that place from the school.”

Murphy, who developed the film with the producer Alan Moloney and his Oppenheimer co-star Matt Damon, gives a characteristically tender, interior performance as a man burdened with a conscious even heavier than his considerable knitwear. Unflappable as the icy Sister Mary, Emily Watson takes a scalpel to the kind of scenes a lesser actor would approach with an axe. Through small references (on a radio, we hear reports of the prizefighter Barry McGuigan), Meliants nods to the beginning of an era when Ireland’s national pride swelled. Seemingly going on little more than a gut feeling, Furling appears as a man unconvinced by it all––the irony is that it’s his Cristian upbringing that’s causing him to question. There are shades of Rust Cole in his performance, even Joe from You Were Never Really Here. There’s a few instances where Meliants shows him looking out from the coal shed, half-visible in the soot and fading light, a little war being waged in his head. To act or not to act––a small thing indeed.

Small Things Like These premiered at the 2024 Berlinale.

Grade: B+'

[fdelopera]

screaming forever about the relationship between Dionysos and Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae ... and how Dionysos tried to tell Pentheus who he was (queer, containing multitudes) ... and how Pentheus ran in fear from these realizations ... but in running, in not embracing who he was, he became a monstrous version of what he feared (dressed as a maenad, torn to pieces)......

and then screaming forever at how this esoteric knowledge about *self* was so important that it was codified throughout the Greek speaking world, so that even the "Gnostic" Gospel of Thomas contains this line, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you".

yeah. just screaming forever.

[crazy-maracuya]

Im gonna do whats called an Euripides move

[politedemon]

fucking insane that things like magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes existed and then the church just has to go 'oops shouldn't have done that soz' and gets to keep existing like if that doesn't show the the whole concept of your organization is rotten to the core what does

[dolokhoded]

i gave myself the okay to post the apostles before everyone else was done too because i wanted people to see them but now it doesn't feel right and i will not be doing that thank you for your time .