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

It's 1912. Peaceful demonstrations have achieved little for suffrage in Britain. Suffragettes are resorting to vandalism. Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) is a young mother working in a laundry for most of her life. She suffered under her lascivious boss Mr. Taylor. Co-worker Violet Miller recruits her into the movement. After testifying to Minister Lloyd George, the government still refuses to give the vote. Maud is beaten and arrested along with MP wife Alice Haughton (Romola Garai), Violet and Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter). Police inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) leads the effort to suppress the rebels. Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) urges the women to fight. After another arrest, Maud is thrown out by her husband Sonny Watts (Ben Whishaw) and by law, loses her rights to her own son.

One would expect an uplifting feel-good inspirational movie from the subject matter. The fact is that this is a dour, depressed telling of the struggle that is not simply marching and sit-ins. The violence is brutal but it's the overwhelming oppression that is even more brutal. The downtrodden acting by Carey Mulligan is superb. It is a movie of suffering and women with no choice but to rebel.

Scripted by Abi Morgan, who gave us THE IRON LADY four years ago, this is a finely judged snapshot of a key year (1912-13) in the decades-long battle for women to get the vote in England. Meryl Streep has brief but commanding appearances as cranky old Mrs Pankhurst, imperiously redirecting her campaign from the ruling class to the working class. The key character here is the fictitious Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a young laundrywoman and mother who is drawn into the new campaign of 'civil disobedience', which will soon include blowing up post boxes and cutting telegraph wires.

Of the male characters, only Helena Bonham Carter's husband (Finbar Lynch) is sympathetic to the Cause. Brendan Gleeson's police inspector is well-served by the writer: central to the brutally repressive treatment of the Suffragettes, he is allowed a moment of doubt towards the end. Ben Whishaw seems uncomfortable in the challenging role of Maud's husband, totally intolerant her involvement with the Movement.

This is, in the fullest possible sense, a Women's Picture, written and directed (Sarah Gavron) by women, and it is the women who make it work and make it pull at your heartstrings. Bonham-Carter, Anne-Marie Duff and Romola Garai give telling performances. Carey Mulligan, who somehow didn't seem to get the period right in the remake of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, is at her absolute best here, utterly convincing as an oppressed working mother reluctantly drawn into the campaign to give women fairer pay and a voice in the governance of the realm.

The Dickensian factory-sized laundry (a museum piece or a reconstruction?) is magnificently awful, and the teeming crowd scenes outside Parliament and at the fateful Epsom Derby suggest the production must have had a good budget (or some crafty CGI). There are moments of humour in the grim struggle, but this movie brings to life vividly and touchingly the high price paid by some women to obtain the right to vote for all women.

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.

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.