‘The Divine Order’ revisits how women in Switzerland secured the right to vote
MOVIE REVIEW | To persist or not?
Movie review by Stephanie Merry. Views expressed are the opinions of the author.
Decades after Danish, Dutch and American women secured the right to vote, Switzerland dragged its feet. It took a referendum in 1971 to change the laws, and the months leading up to that vote are the backdrop of the drama “The Divine Order.”
Writer-director Petra Biondina Volpe’s movie doesn’t follow the Susan B. Anthony types, who fought the patriarchy for years, but zeroes in on a less likely hero: Nora (Marie Leuenberger) is a quiet housewife in a tiny village untouched by the counterculture movement sweeping the globe.
Nora spends her days cooking, cleaning and taking care of her two sons and vicious father-in-law, who treats her like a servant. She’s not exactly fulfilled by this existence, so she considers going back to work part-time, but her husband, Hans (Maximilian Simonischek), won’t hear of it. At first he jokes — sort of — that, if she’s bored, he’ll just impregnate her again. But eventually he gets serious: The woman’s place is in the home, he insists. And besides, it’s not up to her; he gets to make those decisions.
That vexing conversation isn’t her sole impetus for embracing politics, but it’s enough to get her started. After stumbling on some activists in a neighboring town, Nora goes all in on spreading the word to her neighboring housewives. Before you know it, she’s chopping off her hair and wearing tight, high-waisted jeans, not to mention collecting a few allies. At first it’s just an elderly widow named Vroni (Sibylle Brunner) and an Italian divorcée (Marta Zoffoli), who’s a recent transplant.
The movie follows a familiar formula, so of course it’s going to be an uphill battle. Most of the village tries to turn Nora into a laughingstock, and her sons start getting bullied at school, which puts her at a crossroads: To persist or not?
Much of the film’s power lies in its serendipitous timing. One of the big themes is the importance of allies, and how it takes only one or two to encourage a fledgling leader to fight for positive social change. In the present-day world, this, too, is a moment when allies are stepping up, especially as women come forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault. Hecklers will always be there, of course, but there’s a greater sense that accusers now have people standing by them, willing to listen to stories and take the allegations seriously.
“The Divine Order” is far from a perfect movie. Some of its references are painfully on-the-nose, as when Nora tells her children a story about fish who live at the bottom of the ocean, oblivious to the sunlight above. More jarringly, staunchly misogynistic characters change in outlandish ways to ensure a tidy resolution.
But the movie still holds power, mostly thanks to Leuenberger’s arresting, self-contained performance as Nora. She plays the character as an enigma, the last person you’d expect to lead a cause. “I didn’t think you had it in you,” Vroni says after Nora stands up, however meekly, to a bully.
The message here is that everyone has it in them — all it takes is a friend or two fighting for the same thing.
This movie review originally appeared in The Washington Post.
