The Divine Order / Die Göttliche Ordnung (2017, Dir. Petra Volpe)
Synopsis:
Switzerland 1971 — despite the huge social upheavals that have gone on throughout the U.S. and Europe during the previous decade, life in this country hasn’t changed much since the 1930s. Women do not have the right to vote and must ask their husband‘s permission if they want to go back to work after raising a family. Nora (Marie Leuenberger), a young housewife and mother who has no real interest in politics until several events (her niece being sectioned because of her promiscuity, her husband refusing to give her permission to go back to work) make her question the status quo. Little by little she organizes a group in favor of Women being given the right to vote in the forthcoming referendum. She’s helped by the encouragement of an older woman in the village, Vroni (Sybille Brunner), who’d voted for Women’s right to vote during the previous referendum in 1959, a divorced Italian woman who’s moved into the village and eventually her sister-in-law. However, she faces stiff opposition not only from the village and the local busybody of a mill owner, but also her husband and his family.
Regular readers will be aware that I generally try to start the year with a film set in winter, as January and February are generally the months where we have the heaviest snowfall here in Switzerland and it seems somewhat appropriate. This year I‘m very pleased, for the first time on this blog, to be able to do this with a Swiss made film.
Switzerland doesn’t generally do particularly well in Hollywood films. Despite Swiss bank accounts often being mentioned in spy thrillers, scenes set in Switzerland are rarely actually filmed there. Films like the Bourne Identity often choose Prague as a location substitute. Switzerland does have its own thriving local film industry but few of the films make much of an impression outside of Europe. All of which makes me only to happy to feature this brilliant little movie which was the most successful Swiss film of 2017, in the hope that it might encourage a few of my non-Swiss speaking readers to track it down.
As a teenager, my Mother was very adamant that one shouldn’t waste one’s right to vote. As a woman she knew how much her Grandmother and Great Grandmother‘s generation had fought to get it. I grew up in the U.K. believing without question that every adult regardless of gender or status should have the right to vote. Imagine my shock when I moved to Switzerland with my wife to discover that women there had gotten the right to vote only a few years before my wife and I were born, in the 1970s. Even then it would take until 1981 to include equal right to vote in the constitution and until 1990 for the last stubborn County (or Kanton, as they are called over here) to concede.
This film deals with the public referendum that signaled the beginning of this countrywide change and it’s impact on a small scale — in one village in Switzerland. Whilst it does alter the facts a little (it suggests that no women had the right to vote in 1971 — whereas in fact some Kantons ,such as Zürich, where the women go to protest, were already allowing women to vote in 1970 and before — though whether those votes were actually counted I’m not sure) — but there’s no denying the fact that in many places in Switzerland, especially in the smaller villages like the one this story is set in, life for many women was exactly like it was for the female characters in this film.
You‘d be wrong however, if you were expecting this film to be a straightforward attack against the patriarchy. In fact, whilst there several abhorrently sexist male characters (Nora’s father-in-law, some of the other workers at the mill) the film’s greatest strength is showing that it’s not simply the men who are the problem or just the women who are the victims. The most vocal opponent of Nora and her group is the female boss of the local mill, who also cruelly uses her influence over Nora‘s husband, (who works for her and has just been promoted) to try and put pressure on Nora. Look also at how, at the beginning of the film, the men at the mill pick on a younger trainee because he has long hair. The film’s position is very clear — it’s not just about women’s rights, but about equality generally and how ingrained sexism can be on an everyday level.
The film features superb performances not just from German born Marie Leuenberger (who resembles Cate Blancett a little) as Nora — There’s also great support from Rachel Braunschweig as her sister in law as well as Maximilian Simonischek as Nora’s husband and Nicholas Ofczarek as his brother — whose character is especially tragic, in that the pressure he feels from both his father and the village leads him to send away his daughter and be abusive to his wife. However, the stand out performance is clearly that of Sybille Brunner as Vroni who pretty much steals the entire film.
Despite the grimness of elements of the story and some of the scenes in it, there’s also plenty of wonderful humorous moments — the women being asked to get more in touch with their private parts at a feminist lecture or Nora’s little boy asking his father what an orgasm is. The cinematography by Judith Kaufmann is superb and reminds me a little of Robby Müller’s work on Breaking The Waves or some of Sven Nyqvist’s work. The music by Annette Focks is also excellent and finds just the right mixture of poignancy and hopefulness throughout.
After a year where it’s been made abundantly clear that sexism and misogyny against women is still very prevalent both in Hollywood and the world in general, do yourself a favor and seek out this superb little film that shows that change really does „begin at home“ and any of us can make a difference if only we have the courage to stand up and do something.
