TWISTED `SISTERS' PETER MULLAN'S DRAMATIZATION OF A SHAMEFUL SECRET IN IRISH CATHOLICISM DRAWS CONTRITION, CONDEMNATION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Peter Mullan freely admits that his primary motivation for writing and directing ``The Magdalene Sisters'' - an alternately acclaimed and condemned expose of the Sisters of Mercy-run laundries in which thousands of Irish women were forced to work for much of the last century - grew out of animosity toward the Catholic Church in which he was raised.

``Definitely, all of it, absolutely,'' Mullan, a wiry Scotsman in his mid-40s, says in a thistly Glaswegian burr. ``I'm a Socialist, so no, I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. But it's funny; if anything happens in my life that's of a spiritual nature, the first place I go is a church because that's what I know. ... It stays with you forever.''

Forever seems like the sentence of three young women who we follow through the film, which opened Friday. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is sent to the laundries after a cousin rapes her during a wedding reception. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is turned over to the order for giving birth out of wedlock; she never sees her infant son again. And defiant orphan Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is locked away for the crime of being too pretty.

Cut off from all outside contact, the women are forced into long hours of intensive labor for no pay except atonement for their perceived sins. In the film, they suffer psychological and sometimes physical torture by the nuns, as well as occasional sexual abuse from visiting priests.

``I was free to write about how I felt about the Magdalenes, with all of my prejudices and all of my sympathies and all the rest of it,'' says Mullan, who subsidized his script-writing with acting jobs. Though the director of one previous film, ``Orphans,'' Mullan is better-known as an on- screen presence in the likes of ``My Name Is Joe,'' ``Braveheart'' and ``Trainspotting.'' ``But at the end of it, I showed it to one lady who was a nun in the Magdalenes and another lady who was a survivor of the Magdalenes. If either of them had told me the script bore no relation to what happened, then the project would have been over. They both came back the following day and said that this was as near to the truth as they could remember it.''

Although the film begins in 1964, the last of the laundries operated into the mid-1990s. The institutions' abuses have been reported widely for many years, in media ranging from ``60 Minutes'' to Irish ballads to ``Sex in a Cold Climate,'' the British television documentary from which Mullan first learned about the Magdalenes.

Still, it came as little surprise when ``Sisters'' was attacked by the Vatican during the Venice Film Festival last year. The movie won the prestigious festival's top prize.

``Before we won that, there were headlines saying that I was a liar; that was the official Vatican line,'' Mullan reports. `` 'It did not happen, I made all this up'; not the brightest of things to do. Journalists from all over Italy flooded London and Ireland, and of course they came back with stories that made the film look positively moderate. So the Catholic Church backed off.

``When we got to Ireland, the Irish Catholic Church said nothing,'' Mullan adds, noting that more than a quarter of the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic's population has seen the film. ``Absolutely nothing, no comment. And then, when we opened in Scotland and England in February, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland had his official spokesman take out half a page in a variety of papers that recommended every Catholic in the country should go and see the film. So, from September to February, we've had a completely different approach from the Catholic Church.''

Well, not entirely. The July 17 review of the film by the Catholic News Service says, ``The severe living conditions in Catholic Church-run laundries ... are sensationalized to the point of caricature,'' adding that Mullan puts forth an ``oversimplified, worst-case scenario.''

William Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a watchdog group not affiliated with the Church, sees ``Magdalene Sisters'' as the latest in a line of Catholic-bashing Miramax Films releases that includes ``Priest'' and ``Dogma.''

``First of all, I appreciate the honesty of Peter Mullan, who's admitted that he's a bigot,'' Donohue says. ``He has said that he went out of his way to put everything that was negative about the Catholic Church into the movie. Most people that I deal with who don't like Catholics aren't so honest. Secondly, by comparing the Catholic Church to the murderous Taliban, I think that he, again, has done us a good service because we don't really have to argue too much as to why (he made) the movie.''

Donohue continues: ``Our principal objection is that what he is showing, he wants the viewer to understand, is prototypical. Our argument is that it is atypical. ... The question is this: Was that the norm, or was that the most extreme negative manifestation? I would argue that, from everything we've learned, that would be the latter.''

Wait a minute. Did Donohue say Mullan compared the Church to the Taliban?

``My exact statement in Venice was, 'In the context of the Magdalenes, in the context of a theocratic state, the Catholic Church and the Taliban behaved in remarkably similar ways in relation to young women,' '' the filmmaker explains. ``By the time that got around, the whole thing had been taken out of context.''

Mullan claims that his only personal confrontation with a conservative Catholic was over that remark. It was a polite exchange with a Glasgow cab driver during a trip to the airport.

``So we had this 22-minute discussion, and it was great because I was able to clarify a lot of things,'' Mullan says. ``By the end of it, we shook hands, and quite rightly we agreed to disagree.''

Mullan lives in mostly Protestant Scotland (where he also shot the film, out of fear of ``low-level sabotage'' that might have been encountered on the other side of the Irish Sea). But actress Noone, whose first movie this was, says that she's gotten nothing but positive feedback in her hometown of Galway.

``I think people in Ireland understand that it's not anti-Catholic and they understand what it was like back then,'' 19-year-old Noone says. ``I haven't had any bad experiences at all at home. I think it's a very important part of our history and people kind of see it as that.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) A nun leads Dorothy Duffy, front, Nora Jane Noone and Anne Marie Duff in ``The Magdalene Sisters.''

(2) no caption (Peter Mullan)