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Suffragette
Jan. 10th, 2019 08:35 amI’ve meant to see Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette ever since I watched Seeing is Believing: Women Direct, in which Gavron is interviewed, and I finally made that happen last week.
It neither blew me away nor particularly disappointed me, and it’s hard to know what to say about something when you have such a muted reaction to it. I did like the fact that the film focused on working class women in the suffrage movement: it’s rare for a period piece to focus on the working classes in the first place, and most of the things I’ve read or watched about the suffragettes have focused on their leaders, for obvious reasons: the leaders of anything always leave behind more records than Jane Cannon Fodder.
It’s a sobering look at how close to the bone working class families lived at the time, especially women: Maud Watts’ life completely unravels as her husband’s disapproval of her involvement with the suffrage movement escalates to the point of kicking her out of the house. It’s a good movie, or at least a competently executed one, but it never really took flight for me.
It neither blew me away nor particularly disappointed me, and it’s hard to know what to say about something when you have such a muted reaction to it. I did like the fact that the film focused on working class women in the suffrage movement: it’s rare for a period piece to focus on the working classes in the first place, and most of the things I’ve read or watched about the suffragettes have focused on their leaders, for obvious reasons: the leaders of anything always leave behind more records than Jane Cannon Fodder.
It’s a sobering look at how close to the bone working class families lived at the time, especially women: Maud Watts’ life completely unravels as her husband’s disapproval of her involvement with the suffrage movement escalates to the point of kicking her out of the house. It’s a good movie, or at least a competently executed one, but it never really took flight for me.
