Swanvale Halt Film Club: Suffragette (2015)

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.