As Sufragistas

Biographical movies are always fascinating. If it is not something worthy, the movie would have not taken up the shape. It was a very good movie, and a very important historical subject. It has been 100 years since and now the world we live-in is much different and better. I think after thousands of years, now the women got their freedom.

I thought I knew this story very well, but it was 'Made in Dagenham' which is quite similar to this which is also based on the real. Both the stories take place 50 years apart, but this one was the beginning of a new era for women, not without sacrifices and sufferings.

Great actors, great actings, awesome storytelling, cinematography at its best, direction was amazing and the music was so pleasant, but the method of dealing was a bit gruesome, and sometimes brutal. I thought the terrorism is a new word, but this movie gives a different perspective and meaning to that.

You would definitely love this film if you respect women. All women cast movie, including the director, but for everyone. It might have begun in the UK, but the entire planet saw a drastic change and still taking place in some places. I don't see any reason why I should not recommend it to you.

8/10

Years ago the BBC did a series SHOULDER TO SHOULDER (1974) that told the story of the origins and development of the Women's Movement in Britain, with special attention paid to the WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union).

Sarah Gavron's film revisits the same territory as it tells the story of the gradual awakening of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) as she sets her marriage and family aside in favor of the Women's Movement. The crux of the action centers around the death of Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) at the 1913 Derby, as she stepped out in front of the horses finishing the race and was crushed to death.

In view of the film's earnestness of purpose, it seems a shame to criticize it. However there are certain jarring elements that do stand out. Abi Morgan's screenplay seems uncertain whether to focus on the political or the familial elements. Maud's husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) is just too placid a personality to become truly angry about his wife's decision to embrace the Suffagette cause, and the emotional scene where he decides to let his son George (Adam Michael Dodd) to for adoption is straight out of KRAMER VS. KRAMER.

Director Gavron seems too concerned with showing tight close-ups of Mulligan's face as she struggles her way through a dead-end job at the local laundry. Hence we get little sense of the slave-like existence pursued by most working-class women at that time. Meryl Streep, in the cameo of role of Emmeline Pankhurst, simply reprises her Margaret Thatcher turn in THE IRON LADY (2011).

On the other hand, the film does have its moments, especially when Maud goes to the Houses of Parliament and ends up talking about her life in front of David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller). We get the sense of how much courage it takes to speak up in front of a group of unsympathetic middle-aged men. Helena Bonham Carter is quite surprisingly good as Edith Ellyn, especially in a sequence where she and her co- conspirators plan to blow up a private property constructed for Lloyd George's personal pleasure. The way Edith grinds up the gunpowder reveals her inherent anger at the ways in which women are treated.

The ending is also powerful, as Gavron fades out from the film into faded black-and-white films of Emily Davison's actual funeral taken in 1913. Through this technique we are made aware of the film's importance to an understanding of British social history.

The first feature film I can remember dealing with the fight for women's voting rights in the United Kingdom, puts its subject across respectfully, if carefully. Most of the major events I've read about historically on the movement's road to enfranchisement are covered in the film, like the letterbox campaign, attack on Lloyd George's house, their hunger strike and resultant force-feeding in prison and most famously the shocking martyrdom of Emily Davidson who ran onto Epsom racecourse on Derby Day in front of the King's horse, the latter very realistically.

The device used by the writer and director to get the viewer close to the action is through the invented Carey Mulligan character Maud Watts, a young factory worker, docilely married to her husband and the doting mother of their infant son, who develops an interest in the suffragette movement through a work colleague. Stepping in for the latter at an important consultation with a UK Government committee on votes for women, she finds herself, initially unwillingly, drawn into activism on behalf of the cause.

I did feel the film somewhat overdid her travails and some of the coincidental events in her life. We learn indirectly that her male employer has abused her at work since she was a child and is now doing so to another pre-teen girl at the factory. Her husband doesn't understand her new found politicism and in short order expels her from their house, denies her access to her son and eventually has him adopted without her knowledge. She too is the one accompanying Davidson to the Derby. While I laud the equally important political point of maternal rights to their children in the event of marital separation being argued along with voter's rights, I did feel that the world seemed to revolve too much around Mulligan's character. She thus comes across more as a cipher than a real person and the film might have played better if she had been based on a real person.

I also felt the sub-plot about the child-molesting boss jarred somewhat and belonged in a different film entirely, the two main causes didn't need this extra justification, heinous as the crimes are. While I'm criticising, I also felt the cliff-hanging direction style employed (especially in the build-up to the Derby climax) was overdone with looming orchestral swells in the background and a virtual countdown to the incident itself, to be somewhat inconsistent with the seriousness of the subject matter.

The acting is good by most of the leads, Mulligan in particular. Quite why they rolled out the barrel to find a place in the cast for Meryl Streep to deliver a brief but showy cameo as the cause's figurehead Emmeline Pankhurst, I don't know. Nevertheless in its gritty depiction of the privations and struggles of the brave women who challenged the male-dominated political landscape of the day, this film deserves admiration and recognition for its subject matter if not quite for its execution.

It can be risky critiquing a film homage to heroines of feminism, especially one with a star cast that includes Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw and a Meryl Streep cameo. Respect for the cause, however, does not guarantee respect for the film, and this one chooses a very limited lens with which to view this episode of history. It does have high production values, narrative authenticity and sensitivity for the feminist struggle in early 20th century Britain. But it gets lost in balancing the broader sweep of history that shapes gender relations and the impact of particular individuals.

The story line is uni-linear, the atmosphere dark and claustrophobic, and much of the acting is melodramatic, with long close-ups of Mulligan's finely nuanced expressions recording her progress from an abused laundry worker to what today would be called a radicalised political terrorist. The historical lens is so myopic that you could walk away believing the vote was won by a few protesting women, the bombing of some public letterboxes and a suffragette who threw herself under the King's horse. No more struggle…job done! Of course, that is not true and the struggle continues.

Despite these limitations, it's a finely crafted British film. The fictional heroine Maude Watts is an avatar for the British working class women who risked everything, including their lives, in fighting for the vote. Men of all classes are the demons of this tale, and one of its chilling insights is how the most dangerous enemies of suffragettes were husbands. Patriarchal governments left it to ordinary menfolk to sort out their unruly women in an era where wives were legally subordinate to husbands. Maude's contempt for her treatment at work and home propels her into the swirling orbit of violent protest where "war is the only language men listen to". Evicted by her husband for shaming him, she is left with nothing; by law, even her son was her husband's property. During the struggles, over one thousand British women were imprisoned and treated shamefully, a fact only acknowledged in the film's closing credits. Admittedly, historical judgement is difficult to translate into cinematic language, but many films have done it better. If you are interested in the history of feminist struggle from the viewpoint of the small people who made up the bigger story you will like this film.

Whilst most men would agree that giving women the vote was a dreadful mistake (put that stone down ladies…. it's just a joke), the astonishing story behind the UK social upheaval that was the Suffragette movement is well overdue a serious cinematic treatment. And a serious treatment Sarah Gavron's new film most certainly is: you exit the cinema feeling about as wrung out as the linen in the heroine Maud's workhouse-style laundry.

Carey Mulligan plays Maud Watts, an ordinary and anonymous working woman who progressively gets sucked into the anarchic rabble-rousing of an East-end branch of the Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). With operations run out of a chemist's shop by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) and her sympathetic husband, Maud risks a criminal record and the shame associated with that to pursue her ideals. Police pressure is applied by special forces copper Arthur Steed (Harry Potter's Brendan Gleeson) and personal pressure is put on her by her husband (played by Ben Whishaw, soon to be seen again as 'Q') and her alleged fitness to be a mother to their young son George (Adam Michael Dodd). As politicians continue to ignore the issue, the actions build to one of the most historic events of the period.

The struggle is seen very much through the limited prism of this select group of women. But where I really liked this film is in the slow awakening of Maud's character. In many ways it is like the germination of a seed that we are seeing on the screen. She starts without any interest in the movement and even mid-way through the film she is adamant that she is "not a suffragette", despite evidence to the contrary. Mulligan is, as always, completely brilliant in the role.

The supporting cast are all strong with Gleeson being particularly watchable as the lawman with a grudging respect for Maud and her cause. Meryl Streep makes a powerful cameo as Emily Pankhurst: but it is a short and sweet performance. Maud's friend Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) is also outstanding, her gaunt face delivering a haunting performance.

Whilst there are some highly emotionally charged scenes in the film, in a political sense the film has a curious lack of passion at times. A keynote speech to Lloyd George for example should have been electric - yet the Abi Morgan's script doesn't quite do the scene justice and if I was the MP I wouldn't have been impressed (which perhaps was the point).

I also had issues with some of the cinematography. Carey Mulligan has such an expressive and photogenic face that extreme close ups should work brilliantly. And yet filming it with a hand-held camera produces a constantly shifting image which was extremely distracting. Elsewhere in the art department though 1912 London is beautifully recreated, through both special effects, costume and make-up.

Alexandre Desplat delivers a touching score with a clever underlying drumbeat of change.

Suffragette is a solid historical drama, that tells an important social tale… a tale that graphically illustrates how much the world has really changed, and changed for the better, in a mere hundred years. Above all, the film concludes with the astounding fact that Switzerland only gave women the vote in 1971 (and in fact with one canton holding out on local issues until 1991). Shameful!

(Please find the full graphical review at bob-the-movie-man.com and sign up to receive future reviews).