Suffragette
Went to see Suffragette (dir. Sarah Gavron, 2015) at the Brixton Ritzy on Friday, 6th November; not sure exactly what my expectations were but I was hugely impressed by this factional (fiction based on fact) story about woman’s struggle for the vote in the years immediately prior to the First World War. From the off (1912), the street scenes in Bethnal Green and in Westminster were very convincing and the pace of the action suggested a director in total control of her material.
Not too sure, as memory tricks me, but I think that I was taught at school that the suffragette movement had indeed succeeded in raising the profile of women’s suffrage as an important political issue but it was really the War that brought them the suffrage in 1918. With women working in the munitions factories, in nursing and catering, in the transport and many other industries, it had become almost irrational not to grant them the vote. It was, I think, a history written from a male, patronising perspective. Men had at last decided to be fair and decent.
This film is an excellent counter to that complacent perspective. It tells of bitter, intimate (husband v wife) and local (neighbour v neighbour), conflict. Surely victory was as much delayed by War, as speeded on by it. The story is told with a light touch. A young mother, Maud Watt, played exquisitely by Carey Mulligan, drifts almost accidentally into being a curious spectator. Then the dynamics of her situation, the attentions of her sleazy supervisor, the peer pressures of her workmates and her neighbours’ push-and-pull her slowly but inevitably into activism – and the loss of her marriage and her son.
The story cleverly weaves Maud into the events that led to Emily Davison’s death under the hooves of Anmer, King George V’s horse in the 1913 Derby. The screenplay by Abi Morgan is sensitive throughout and the whole film has a superb historical feel, even if there are some arguments about the political detail – it is doubtful that Emily Davison intended to die and also unlikely that a Cabinet member’s wife would have behaved as displayed.
There was a personal appeal for me, because it reminded me so much of stories from my paternal grandmother. She was a seamstress from inner north-east London, who walked to work in Oxford Street. She had four children, was widowed in 1918, and was proud of her vote in the 1919 General Election. Her loathing of Winston Churchill, Home Secretary in the Asquith Government; her politics (and just maybe mine) is illuminated by this film.
It is almost redundant to talk of other great performances, notably that by Helen Bonham-Carter’s and a guest appearance by Meryl Streep as Mrs. Pankhurst; or of the gruesome nature of forced feeding. The film also has a lot to say about the nature of opposition. When does “illegal” action become justifiable? Is violence ever justified? How responsible does opposition have to be? Go and see it, if you haven’t done so already.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 