Suffragette Analysis

Suffragette is a 2015 British historical period drama film directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan. The film centres on early members of the British women's suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century; The film stars Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep. It follows the story of Carey Mulligan’s character Maud, as she goes from disgruntled and abused factory worker to empowered woman of the movement and although being a fictional character she is heavily involved in some of the more major activates of the movement.

 The cinematography was great and this is in large part due to the stand out set’s which recreated early 1900s London faithfully, the camerawork did a good job of showing off these meticulously crafted sets and every scene felt real despite there being a number of different locations used during the film. I did not like the use of shaky cam however in the films more action oriented scenes as I felt it was not necessary and felt out of place in a period drama, when that sort of camera work is more suited in an action film, although I do not like the effect at all.

The narrative of the story however was mixed and in my opinion flawed in its telling of the story, it attempted to focus too much on different things. They showed Maud’s story well to begin with and you felt invested in what was going on with her life and her involvement within the movement, but during the final portion of the film the focus was moved to the movement as a whole and it felt like Maud’s story was put on the back burner in favour of drawing audience appeal of recreating the heroic efforts of the suffragettes.

I did not like this for two reasons, namely they did not finish Maud’s story and left me with many questions that I would have liked to seen tied up, there intent to focus on the movement as a whole nearing the end did not work out well as I felt that a minor character was thrust to the spot light over a major thing she did, there was no character build up with her so I didn’t have time to like her as a character. The final event that was her death was also not that major of a thing to end on and left the film feeling deflated as perhaps the whole ending half hour of the film was poorly executed and the decided to tie off some stories without doing that with ones the audience actually cared about.

 I also wished they would have ended on a more memorable event perhaps, such as the 1918 voting act that extended universal suffrage to women over thirty, seeing as that Is what they were fighting for the whole film it would have been more satisfying to end on that.