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In 'The Magdalene Sisters' sex is a crime punishable by slavery, as Peter Mullan tells Nick James
He seems as straightforward a Glasgow pubman as you could meet, but there is something slightly deceptive about actor-writer-director Peter Mullan. Though very pally and keen for you to relax, he loves to flash a surprise at you, usually with a cocky gleam in his eye. He knows how to charm, how to make his pugnacious physique look cuddly and his collaring gab more disarming, yet he also salts his argot with deft references to the likes of Tarkovsky, Brecht and Sirk. The physical half of that equation shows that he's a talented actor, but the references succinctly let you know that he's as much, if not more, a natural director, as his absurdist first feature Orphans (1997) and several fine shorts have proved.
Similarly, the opening of his new feature The Magdalene Sisters, which won the Golden Lion at Venice last year, shakes off both the preconceptions of those who saw and loved Orphans, and is no reliable guide to what comes after. The scene is a small-town wedding in 1960s Ireland. While a traditional band plays to the rhythm of a bodhrán, we see a near-silent tragedy unfold before us in which a boy lures his cousin Margaret to a side room and rapes her. Margaret tells a female relative what happened and soon the news spreads in whispers upwards through the hierarchy of the men who run things. In this economically elegant set piece, shot in a montage style the film never quite returns to, we instantly understand the dynamics of a community whose solution to the problem, once it is clear that Margaret is pregnant, is to send her away from her family to one of the Magdalene homes run by the sect of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy.
Margaret, played with grit and grace by Anne Marie Duff, is one of the three principal victims who here represent the thousands of Irish women sent into a form of slave labour working in the Magdalene laundries. The other two are Bernadette (the doe-eyed, quicksilver Nora Jane Noone), an orphan who is banished because her beauty is too naturally alluring, and...