Judas priest
How outrageous are Padre Amaro's sins?

By Dennis Harvey

PERHAPS LIKE SAYING the words "U.S. imperialism" too loudly here, acknowledging Catholic Church corruption in Mexico is something that's OK (no doubt even popular) to do in private, but to discuss the same thing in public can get you called subversive, a crackpot, or worse. By contrast, our nation is so generally secular – no matter what Jesse Helms and company might think – that pederast-priest jokes have been prime-time entertainment for years.

It's important to keep those very different standards in mind while watching El crimen del Padre Amaro or trying to grok why it has become Mexico's all-time homegrown box-office champion, as well as a huge source of controversy. A bishops' consortium called for the film's banning even before it was released.

El crimen del Padre Amaro comes off as a rather old-fashioned potboiler that tells more than it shows in the scandalous-content department and comes off as a slightly upscale telenovela with unfulfilled delusions of grandeur.

Based on an 1875 novel by Portugese author José María Eça de Queiroz, though updated to present-day Veracruz by scenarist Vicente Leñero, the story tallies an almost Sadean checklist of sins, hypocrises, and abuses, mostly piled by the powerful and purportedly pious on the poor and helpless. With "friends" like these, does God need enemies?

Still, there's at least a veneer – self-deluding or not – of good intentions to the clerical protagonists at the start, as newly ordained young Padre Amaro (Gael García Bernal) is shipped off for a dues-paying stint in the hinterlands. After this unglamorous but not particularly taxing assignment, he's assured by the diocese bishop (Ernesto Gómez Cruz) that he'll be fast-tracked for better things. Arriving in midsize burg Los Reyes, he's introduced to its splendid cathedral and longtime chief papal representative Padre Benito (Sancho Gracia).

With his angelic good looks and deferential manner, Amaro appears the perfect wee acolyte. But there's considerable ambition lurking under that surface, and a quickness to judge – he soon learns to disdain the older priest's secret affair with café owner Sanjuanera (Angélica Aragón), not to mention Benito's money-laundering for drug kingpin Chato Aguilar (Juan Ignacio Aranda). The latter deal is rationalized as a necessary evil that serves the greater good; after all, generous kickbacks are funding Benito's pet project, an ambitious local health care facility. As for the former – almost everyone in robes here agrees that the celibacy thing is just so 16th century.

Padre Amaro is in no position to protest overmuch once he's commenced his own course of horizontal worship with Sanjuanera's nubile young daughter Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón, a bit overripe to play a 16-year-old). Maximizing the outrage, their trysts take place in an outlying shack inhabited by an epileptic girl who screams in terror at their moans of pleasure.

Such goings-on inevitably attract the notice of another "crazy" personality, not-so-dumb ranter Dionisia (Luisa Heurtas), who's eager to think the worst of God's official employees. More important, however, Amelia's dumping of boyfriend and aspiring journalist Rubén (Andrés Montiel) results in a number of unpleasant newspaper revelations that land bishop, Benito, and druglord alike in hot water. They temper the heat by redirecting it toward Padre Natalio (Damián Alcázar), a genuinely good if somewhat unorthodox priest whose work with mountain peasants has brought accusations of consorting with guerillas.

Before things have run their course, abortion, murder, alcoholism, blackmail, and plenty of plain old fibbing have joined the story's list of confessable behaviors. At once appropriately and excessively passive as a character whose baby face reveals none of the scheming going on inside, Bernal also played boy-puppies in Y tu mamá también and Amores perros, the two other Mexican cinema sensations of recent years. But where those films transcended their shock value with artistry, El crimen del Padre Amaro is pulp executed with restraint and competency but little personality.

How seriously you can take these two hours' histrionics will depend on your own relationship with papal authority. If, deep down, you do now or have ever believed they're somehow above ordinary human failing, then maybe El crimen del Padre Amaro's billing as "one of the most controversial films ever made" will resound as something more than hype.

'El crimen del Padre Amaro' opens Fri/22 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film Listings, for show times.