Suffragette.

I must first address the fact that this blogpost is the first piece of actual work that I am producing sat at my bedroom desk whilst sat on my new (wonky) Ikea chair.

Secondly: this post will just be me talking/discussing/reviewing (but not really reviewing) the newly released, period drama film Suffragette.

Thirdly, and I don't mean to spoil it for those who haven't yet seen it but there is a death involving a lady and a horse.

The film was released on the 12th of October so for those who are thinking of going to see it (I desperately urge you to do so) I've just placed the trailer above.

As I was watching the film I kind of devised a structure for this post in my head and decided to split it into themes and sections. As mentioned in previous posts I am really bad at coherently organising my thoughts so bear with me on that.

The plot of the film essentially follows the life of Maud Watts sometime around 1912 as she discovers, learns about and joins the suffragette movement. What I like about how it's written is that, although it follows Maud's personal struggles alongside factual and historical events, the things that affect Maud can be generalised to any woman at the time so they still hold a lot of relevance to the overall message.

Previously I was actually very uneducated on the Suffragette movement (which, as a feminist, is kind of bad really). When I walked into the theatre and during the first twenty minutes I had this pretentious attitude towards it and thought it could be all very basic as it only addresses the foundation of women's history and stuff that everybody really ought to know. What I thought is very true but when I really think about it, there was a LOT I didn't even know about the suffragette movement and there's a lot of things that a lot of people don't even know or pay any interest in, which needs to change. This leads me on to my first point/theme:

Maud Watts, I personally thought, was at first a very annoying character. It wasn't until a little while into the film that I started to realise how crap my judgement was so I turned this thought into a fully developed point in my head and stuck a little pin in it so as not to lose it. Throughout the beginning of the film we see Maud develop from a naive and passive character to one of knowledge yet she always has this insistence in not calling herself a suffragette. There was a sense of holding back I felt from her which really aggravated me. I sat there thinking "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS, PLEASE JUST GIVE IN TO YOURSELF" and kind of internally screaming however we do eventually see Maud crack at a certain point during the film as her involvement with the Suffragettes really takes on a butterfly effect. What I decided is that you can draw major similarities between these women of 1912 and us women of 2015. 

Drawing similarities was a penny-dropping moment when I was walking home afterwards. Maud's reluctance to associate herself with these radical women connects so much to women of this era who are so reluctant to associate themselves with the word "feminist". There is this stigma towards feminism just as there was to suffragettes that makes me wonder whether in one-hundred years time people will sit in theatres gasping as they witness girls in clubs being groped or women in the Middle-East not receiving their right to an education. It angers me that people are willing to watch this film and take everything so seriously (disregarding how far we've come in the past 100 years) yet act dismissively towards what's happening to and in front of them.

Through Maud we see themes of work/the home and children being discussed but they look into the personal aspects of Maud's life which could really spoilt it for you if you haven't seen it so I won't delve into them too much.

The film gives focus to working-class women, middle-class women, male allies, imprisonment is very much touched upon, hunger strikes, force feeding, the cat and mouse effect and abuse within the workplace. I couldn't find any details that were spared.

The death of Emily Davison at Epsom was dealt with and shown very well I thought, so much so that I don't think I've ever heard silence within a cinema audience that you could probably physically cut with a knife. I also don't think I've ever seen a film that ended so you could genuinely hear people sobbing around the theatre.

At this point I'm frantically racking my brain for anything else I'm burning to write about.

The end of the film sees the funeral of Emily Davison and, as most biographical/periodical films do, provided a load of textual facts at the end. What I did enjoy though was how they managed to instil the fact that there is still a lot to be done regarding women's rights even now.