Shallow portrayal of Swiss suffrage
Women’s battle for vote has only heroes, villains
Maybe it was something in the mountain air, but on the question of women’s suffrage, Switzerland lagged well behind the United States and Europe — Swiss women didn’t get the vote until 1971. Writerdirector Petra Volpe has dramatized this worthwhile subject in “The Divine Order,” but the project has a simplistic, by-the-numbers feeling, and makes little attempt to understand the suffragists’ opponents, seen as thoroughly hidebound and fit only for disdain.
The cultural upheaval affecting the rest of the Western world seems to arrive late in the small mountain village of the film’s heroine, Nora (Marie Leuenberger), a housewife and mother. Her husband (Maximilian Simonischek) supports the status quo in terms of gender roles, but his father, who lives with the family, is venomous on the issue.
He’s an old-school, dyed-inthe-wool misogynist, who fully believes that a woman’s place is spelled out in no uncertain terms in the Bible (hence the movie’s title). This sentiment is shared by many in the community, including a surprising number of women, some of whom have formed an antifeminist political action group.
The old man is also a hypocrite, as Nora quickly finds out when she discovers a porno magazine hidden in his bed.
Several incidents help raise Nora’s awareness. Her husband exercises his legal right to refuse her permission to get a part-time job outside the house. She meets an older woman whose restaurant was sold, against her will, by her jerk of a husband. She is aghast when a father banishes his defiant daughter — also against her will — to a home for troubled young people.
There are times when the movie strikes a lighter, even comic, tone. When Nora and her friends get together away from the men, they luxuriate in each other’s company, and some of their banter about the sexism they’ve encountered is enjoyable. But “The Divine Order” never really gets a handle on how to balance comedy with its more somber contents.
Perhaps the most humorous sequence is when Nora and friends attend a consciousnessraising session conducted by a hippie-dippy woman in a nearby big city. The woman rhapsodizes about vaginas, and hands the others mirrors so they can inspect their own nether parts, a startling idea to some of them, and decide which animal their genitals resemble — a fox, say, or a butterfly.
Eventually the film abandons all comic overtones and devolves into melodrama. More details would spoil the ending — suffice it to say that the sequence seems entirely calculated to produce angry tears. Short on complexity and depth, “The Divine Order” gives us a parade of heroines and villains. Instead of raising questions, it seems to want to induce in viewers a sense of smugness.