Interview: Director Petra Volpe on Swiss Oscar Submission 'The Divine Order'

By Jose Solís

I don’t remember exactly what horrible thing the new US administration had announced it wanted to do the day I found myself walking into The Divine Order at the Tribeca Film Festival. I knew nothing about the movie and decided I’d give it ten minutes to capture my attention and help me escape whatever ghastly reality was shaping outside. I didn’t want to watch anything about war, genocide etcetera.

All I wanted was hope, and boy did Petra Volpe’s lovely film deliver...

In telling the tale of how women won the right to vote in Switzerland in the early 1970s (!!!!!) she made the kind of film the world needed at that moment: a socially conscious, empowering work, that also managed to be delightful and entertaining.

The film centers on Nora (Marie Leuenberger) a dissatisfied housewife who decides to become the leader of the suffragette movement in her small town when her husband refuses to give her permission to get a job. Soon many other women join the cause, and at one point they go on strike, turning the town on its head. Volpe’s smart, sensitive approach, combined with the ensemble make for an irresistible treat. Volpe delivers the laughs, but she doesn’t shy away from the bad, and the film shows us how far we have to go in terms of gender equality. The film won the Audience Award at Tribeca, and was selected to represent Switzerland at the Oscars. I spoke to director Volpe about her feminist body of work, and what surprised her the most about her country’s history.

Our interview follows:

JOSE: Every day in America after the election it’s like we’re being beaten up, but your film gave me so much hope!

PETRA VOLPE: (Laughs)

JOSE: Can you talk about giving people hope through art?

PETRA VOLPE: I agree with you, this movie hits really close to home in America. At Tribeca people were very emotional and grateful to see a movie about a woman who has civil courage and persists, who stands up for justice and freedom and wins. All those topics are close to Americans right now. In Europe it’s not as extreme, we don’t have Donald Trump, but we have the extreme right and people with conservative ideas about the role of women in society. The film certainly became more timely than when we set out to make it. I wanted to have a heroine who came from the normal people, a young housewife who reminded me of my mother, and in her journey she discovers that the personal is political. That topic never gets old, we need to remind people that as individuals they can stand up for something. At the moment I believe people need a little bit of hope.

JOSE: At one point in the film Nora realizes she’s never enjoyed sex with her husband. You show her also discovering her own sexual agency. Why was it important for you to show this side of her?

PETRA VOLPE: I did a lot of research, I tried to understand the time, the context, and what was going on in America with the sexual liberation. I think for women liberation is also a sexual liberation, finding a way to know your body. For women to be strong they need to love their bodies, know their bodies, they need to embrace their sexuality. If they don’t have that they don’t have the strength to fight. You can always undermine women through their bodies, there’s a war against female bodies, they’re over sexualized in advertising, look also at the Harvey Weinstein thing. In the end also the husband Hans (Maximilian Simonischek) is just a man of his time, he doesn’t know better, he doesn’t know that if Nora enjoys her sexuality, his sexuality will also improve. In the movie I wanted to show equality is good for men and women. Patriarchy is also a prison.  

You mentioned a war and in the movie we see the women create their battle fort in the restaurant. There are almost no cinematic references for an army made out of women, so you were creating many of them. What was this like?

I took my references from literature, Lysistrata, and Nora’s name came from Ibsen, I wanted to reference pieces of art that depict strong women. I wanted to honor these stories from before, but the problem is women’s history doesn’t exist either. Our history is always swept under the carpet, like the story in the film, in Switzerland we knew about this, but in school we don’t learn about the 100 year long history of women fighting for the right to vote. I think the pizzeria being their house and place of solidarity was something I loved because it showed the women eating, drinking and deriving joy from these things together.

Can you talk about the work you do with Film Fatales?

It’s a great organization, there are chapters all over America and now also in Europe. It was started by Leah Meyerhoff in a living room with women who came together to talk about work, then it grew very fast, now we meet once a month and talk about what we’re working in. It’s a solidarity group of female filmmakers supporting each other in this world that’s very hostile towards women. Together we talk, drink and gather strength to fight. In many countries women is fed up with extreme sexism, women start to stand up because we can’t accept this any more. Solidarity ignites change.

If you had asked me which country had given women the right to vote last, Switzerland wouldn’t have come to mind. We have this idea of Switzerland as a very progressive place, it’s shocking to learn it came so late! Was there an element of shame in the country because of this and what was it like for you to bring this to the forefront? Did some people want to pretend none of this had happened?

It is very surprising, but Switzerland is socially a very conservative country. Switzerland is the only place where the men voted to decide this, they had voted in 1959 and 60% were against it, it was a huge humiliation for women because all the other countries around Switzerland had given women the right to vote. By 1971 it had become so shameful on an international level that even the church wanted women to vote. The government had the guts to want to sign the Human Rights treaty with an extra clause saying “but in our country women can’t vote.” Politicians were being laughed at, so they had to support it. When it finally came through there was a lot of silence around it, as if they were saying “it’s done, let’s move on,” but then it took women another 20 years to change the marital laws establishing men can’t forbid women to work, that women could open their own bank accounts. A lot of things were swept under the rug.

In Switzerland we have state funding for films, and when we started doing our film people thought it was about time. It’s important we show shameful things about our country too. We don’t talk about what this means to us as a society. So we got support from a lot of women politicians who showed the film around, also parliamentarians who had been through this. I think this is why the film became a box office success. I think many men were also surprised to see this wasn’t a film attacking men, it was important they understood that the women’s cause was also their cause.

You spoke to men who had voted against women’s rights to vote, what was their excuse?

They had all these absurd excuses, but also the female characters in the film who oppose it, they all were based on real people. Some of the quotes are originals from things women wrote in pamphlets opposing their own right to vote. Men said if women voted the home life would fall apart, the notion was politics are dirty so they’re made for men. My favorite argument was that women voting would bring quarrels into family life, they said mothers and fathers would fight all the time. I also loved the argument that if women voted they would vote for someone like Hitler since that was had happened in Germany. Isn’t that terrible? It was women’s fault that Hitler came to power according to these men. There was also this famous poster showing a baby falling out a window with the title “Mother went to the ballot.”

How did this tie into the film being selected to represent Switzerland at the Oscars?

In Switzerland they have a jury of five people who select the film. The film was a huge international and national success that they simply could not not send us. No other film this year had been as successful, I think if they hadn’t chosen it there would have been an uproar.

I was very pleased to discover you wrote the screenplay for the live action Heidi film that came out a few years ago. I grew up watching the Heidi cartoons…

That’s so cute.

...in your screenplay she’s so strong, in the films and TV shows from when I was a kid she was so passive.

Yeah I made her a little tomboy (laughs) but this came from the literature, it’s in Johanna Spyri’s books, but the movies always made her soft and too girly, but she was badass!

Heidi is like a prequel to The Divine Order.

Yeah, all my movies are like that. I think it comes from my mother and my Italian grandmother, who grew up very poor, she was forced into a marriage, but she was a strong woman. My mother wasn’t as unhappy as her mother, but she struggled. That’s why I keep doing the same movie over and over again about women breaking free.

The Divine Order is now in theaters.