One of the things I enjoyed most today was going to the cinema with the girls to see Suffragette! Our age means we get in for £5 at the Barbican and so we basically couldn't go wrong from there. To my disappointment the film turned out not to be feel good comedy as I'd expected (like Made in Dagenham) but an emotional roller coaster that had us laughing and then crying to such an extent that I began to fear for the safety of my contact lenses. We all came out with very different opinions of it too. Rebecca and Tash felt a sense of righteous indignation and believed that it was a film everyone ought to see. However I had a number of issues with it. Firstly I felt that the main characters marriage wasn't very convincing. It fell apart so easily. Secondly I wondered why our heroine kept going to feminist meets when she didn't believe in the cause at first - that behaviour made her life very complicated! Third I wondered whether they glamorised violence a bit and overplayed the roe of media attention. After all, if violence really was all that effective then the IRA would be respectable by now and if press coverage were that big a deal then fathers for justice would have justice by now. I kind of felt that there was more story that didn't get told. Yes a woman died in front of a racehorse but (aside from the question of whether the rider survived) it's not clear how this translated into votes then or my ability to buy a cinema ticket using my own money today. Tash says that's the point, the story isn't over yet. To be fair, that's one thing the film did really well. There was so much we wanted to talk about afterwards and I've been thinking about it all week. It's struck me that since the film industry is one of the most unequal industries today, this is an ironic meta study of inequality. In fact I've found the film so thought provoking that I've started recommending it to people. This in itself is a great reason to see it.
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