Apart from Meryl Streep doing her panto turn as Mrs
Pankhurst (of which there isn’t very much in the movie), we very much enjoyed
the worthy Suffragette. I kept
thinking I’d seen Carey Mulligan in something else, but checking her biography
I haven’t – it must have been another actress with similar mannerisms, not that
it matters much.
What struck me most forcibly – why it had never really done
so before I can’t imagine – was the disruptive force of Suffragism and the
sense that anyone who got involved with it was pitching themselves against the
whole way a society functioned, its assumptions and relationships. Ms
Mulligan’s character Maud loses her home and her family as her poor husband,
even more trapped within the patriarchal system than she is, sees his wife turn
into a terrorist and is jeered at, emasculated, by his workmates for allowing
it. He isn’t a bad man: he just can’t see outside that particular box, and is
it any wonder? The way Maud’s understanding of reality is loosened and her eyes
opened to the oppression of the laundry she works in, and the society that
facilitates such petty tyranny, is portrayed with great restraint and all the
more effective for it. No wonder the ‘straight’ world thinks the Suffragettes
are crazy: they can see something everyone else can’t, and when your reality is
so very disturbing to the mainstream’s, mad is very much what you are. Making
this clear, resisting the temptation to present Suffragism as an obvious idea
whose triumph was inevitable, but as something profoundly dangerous, is one of the film’s main achievements, quite
apart from its technical proficiency and the work of the players. Trying to think of a contemporary parallel, I
settled on veganism: but I’m not a vegan, and will leave talking about that for
another time.
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