The Arte.tv site offers a free prison film like no other, in which all the prisoners are women and offers a rare point of view on the genre. Watch out, nugget!
Three years after the success of Scum in 1979, screenwriter Roy Minton co-wrote Scubbers, a new prison film, this time offering it not to Alan Clarke but to a director, the Swedish Mai Zetterling, who had made The Girls, but also three other films that are currently coming out in theaters.
Scrubbers is available for free at ARTE.tv until August 30.
More than a rival of Scum, Scrubbers (or Dangereuse humiliation in French) is more of a complement, another facet of detention centers, focusing more on institutions for young delinquents. There is a gallery of colorful inmates, from Mac the ribald singer to Eddie the black jacket and Kathleen the mother.
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But the real heroines of Scrubbers are Carol and Annetta. After an escape from a center, they are caught and sent to a new center. Carol plans to find her girlfriend Doreen there, but she has found another girlfriend. As for Annetta, she thought she could find her little girl kept in a convent, but finds herself away from it, perhaps forever. Convinced that Carol “swung” her, she decides to prepare her revenge.
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Annetta
We can deplore some intrigues left abandoned, such as that of the prisoner “in her world”, abused and committing suicide in her cell, but whose death is never questioned thereafter. Perhaps to symbolize the oblivion into which prisoners fall, especially those who do not make waves?
Without being a masterpiece at all, Scrubbers deserves to be watched for the female gaze it brings to the “prison film”. We are in 1982, and recognized prison films are exclusively male, the presence of women in prison having mainly been confined to exploitation cinema with the famous “Women In Prison Movies” of the 70s (and 80s).
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What Scrubbers manages to capture is the complicity and the connections created by the conditions of confinement. It is humour, resourcefulness and (sometimes) solidarity that enable most of these women to overcome prison and the difficult times behind bars. It is also very interesting in terms of discovering what are the reasons for confinement of women, compared to those of men.
Note for the anecdote, that the late Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from Harry Potter) appears here in one of his very first roles.