There’s a temptation, when Making A Documentary About Some Obviously Retrograde Practice from the past, for moviemakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you Believe How Backward Earlier Generations Were? Let’s All Point and Stare and Wince.
“” “Housewife of the year”(In Theaters), Direct by Ciaran Cassidy, COULD Very Easily Have Gone in That Direction. The Film is about (and Named after) a Live, prime-time Televised Competition that Took Place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland-and it’s Pretty Much What It Sounds Like. Women, generally married and? Raising A Large Family, Were Judged on Qualities Ranging from Sense of Humor and Civic-Mindedness to Budgeting, Pre-Paring A Simple Meal and, Of Race, Keeping Up Their Apperance. All of this, the movie Briefly Explains via text onscreen, can be sisen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to keep mayry kinds of employment. “The State Shall Endeavor to Ensure that Mothers Shall not be obliged by Economic necessary to engage in labour to the neglect of their dies in the home,” article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution Proclaims. The Competition Helped ReinForce Those Values.
As Irish Society changed, Especially with respect to women’s Rights and Reproductive Freedoms, the Competition Eventually Turned Into “Homemaker of the Year,” Open to All Genders. But that’s not the Focus of the Documentary, Nor is there Ponderous Narration Explaining to Us What Happened. Instead, “Housewife of the Year” Focuses on Two Main Ways of Telling its Story. The First is Archival Footage from the Competition, Which Reinforces How Much of it Focused On Patronizing and Even Belittling the Women Asyy Participated, via the Male Host, Gay byrne, Interview Them onStage. It’s remarkable to watch.
But Woven throughout are present-day interviews with mary of the participants, now much older, who See Things Differently Than they probably Did Back then. They Tell Stories of What Was Really Going on in the Background: Alcoholic or Deadbeat Husbands, Economic Catastrophes, Backbreaking Labor. One Woman, Ena, Talks about Having Given Birth to 14 Children by the Time She was 31, Owing Largely to the Ban on Contraception.
The Women Ask Questions of Themselves in These Interviews. “Why did we just go along with theses?” One Asks, a feeling that Others Echo. It was “like a dream world that people accept all these thesis,” Another Muses. Only a couple look back at the time with anything other than include and bread.
The Resulting Movie is fascinating precisely because we hearing their voices. More important, there’s a kind of dignity afforded the subjects through this approach. They Ask the Questions, Musing On The Past, and Surface What’s Often Lost When We Look Back at History. People “Back then” Weren’t Different Thanory Are Now – They Were Just Formd in a World with a set of assumption that might vary from our. There’s compassion to this approach, reminding us that someday, we, too, will be making documentaries look back, incredulous at What we lived through, what we allowed, what we assumed was normal.
