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

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.

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'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.

This film is a fictionalized story of a woman caught up in the suffrage movement in Britain in the early 20th century. Carry Mulligan plays Maud Watts...a woman who slowly comes into the movement and the sacrifices she personally made as a result.

I noticed that a few of the reviews on IMDb hated the film and by the way they worded the reviews, they seemed upset that women earned the right to vote or thought women never had fight to achieve this!! Strange...very strange. Women DID have to fight and fight hard to earn their rights and the film does a very nice job of it. Why anyone would give the film a 1 or see it as some lie is just baffling...and ignorant of British history. The fictionalized life of Carry Mulligan's is essentially true of many women and the horrific event concerning Emily Davison DID occur in 1913....so why hate that the film dramatizes this?

Overall, the film is extremely compelling and very emotional to watch. Seeing women abused and mistreated is tough....and should grab your heart. Well acted and worth seeing. My only complaint is ts are that the film, at times, is a bit sterile...which is odd considering the events. And, it uses a modern device I hate--the roving camera (hold that camera still #@&@#%^...it's NOT arsty to have bad camera work--particularly on closeups). Still, well worth seeing-- particularly for teens to realize how bad things were and how far we've come.