SEX, LIES,
AND RELIGION
by Howard Schumann

Based on an 1875 Portuguese novel by Eca de Quieros, The Crime of Father Amaro, the new film from director Carlos Carrera, has been updated to modern Mexico. As it opens, Father Amaro (Gael García Bernal) comes to Las Reyes for his first assignment. He starts out as an idealist, showing kindness to a fellow bus passenger whose money is stolen during a holdup, but when he arrives at the parish, he quickly caves in to the established order.

Father Benito (Sancho Gracia) is his superior, and his main project is the building of a hospital, orphanage, and rest home. It is soon learned that Benito is having an affair with a local café proprietor Sanjuanera (Angélica Aragón) and has taken money from the area's major drug lord to finance the hospital. Benito is also a vocal opponent of the "good" priest, Father Natalio (Damían Alcázar) whose support of the peasants and their guerilla revolution stirs resentment from the church hierarchy.

When a reporter for the local paper is given photographs of Father Benito at a baptism with the drug kingpin, he writes an article alleging that the hospital is a front for laundering drug money. The bishop urges Father Amaro to write a rebuttal (i.e., a cover-up) in the paper saying that the funds came only from the church. Amaro then has an affair with the reporter's ex-girlfriend, Sanjuanera's young daughter Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón), and in an awkward scene, the priest drapes her in a blue robe that has been designed for the local church's statue of the Virgin Mary. "You're more beautiful than the blessed virgin," he tells her. The result of this liaison is a scandal that rocks the church.

The Catholic Church has called for a boycott of The Crime of Father Amaro on religious grounds. Personally, I'm more concerned with its artistic transgressions. The film provides little insight into the conflicting pressures that priests face in today's world, and the characters are shallow and uninteresting. Given recent headlines about sexual abuse, this issue could have been the focus for an important film, but Carrera hits us over the head with his message so often that the film ends up as manipulative melodrama, light years away from the subtle ironic thrusts of a Buñuelian sword.

The so-called "Cultural Revolution," instigated by Mao Zedong, resulted in the shutting down of universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals," a term that included boys and girls who had graduated from high school, to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor peasants. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, France's nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year's Golden Globe Awards, is about re-education and is based on the experience of the director Dai Sijie, who spent four years of his life in a similar program.

In this French/Chinese collaboration, two teenage boys, Ma (Ye Liu), a stand-in for Sijie, and Luo (Kun Chen), are sent to live on the remote mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. In the early part of the film, the boys have to use their wits to stay one step ahead of the authorities. In one incident, when the village chief wants to confiscate their violin because he thinks it is a bourgeois toy, they save their instrument by telling him they will play a sonata called "Mozart is Thinking of Mao." In another episode, the chief burns a cookbook, the only book the boys have brought with them, because "Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by a filthy bourgeois chicken."

Ma and Luo seek to lighten their burden by reading books and enjoying music. They steal "subversive" novels of Honoré de Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Gogol, from a student named Four-Eyes, and read them to the granddaughter of the local tailor, known only as the Little Chinese Seamstress (played by Xun Zhou). While reading, both boys fall in love with the girl, and, through Balzac, discover "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden." The unsophisticated girl is deeply affected and feels herself "carried away in a dream." Inspired by the literature, she seeks to escape from the limitations of her present life. By the time the end credits roll around, her biggest influence has been, not Chairman Mao or the Village Chief, but Balzac. Talk about a Cultural Revolution.

While the acting is strong, Xun Zhou looks more like a model from a Beijing studio than a naïve mountain seamstress, and the boys seem more like symbols of the power of art than real people undergoing a difficult and painful experience. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress wants to tell an important story, but comes across as a bit too precious, trivializing its material into a sentimental tone poem that ultimately fails to satisfy. It may, however, succeed in stimulating a revival of Pere Goriot.

Trembling Before G-d was directed by a gay Conservative Jew, Sandi Simcha Dubowski. The film examines the beliefs of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews who are struggling to bridge the gap between their way of life and the teachings of their religion. The film, which played for five months in New York and was named Best Documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, has sparked debate between liberals and conservatives, gay rights activists, the media and spokespersons for organized religion.

Orthodox Jews hold that acts of homosexuality are punishable by death. The passage most quoted is from Leviticus 10:13: "A man who lies with a man as one lies with a woman, they have both done an abomination: they shall be put to death, their blood is on them." Even many moderate Jews believe that homosexuality is evil or, at the very least, a sickness. This is not far different than the beliefs of many Catholics, Mormons, or Muslims as well, but the film only concentrates on Jews, and only on those who are "orthodox" in their beliefs. In the Jewish tradition, Orthodox means belief in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) as the written word of God, strict adherence to dietary laws, and following cultural restrictions such as not driving on the Sabbath.

Dubowski interviewed gays and lesbians in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem, many coping with rejection from their families, issues of suicide and AIDS, and self-acceptance. It is unsettling to hear learned rabbis telling them that they must remain celibate, submit to therapy, or pray until their urges disappear. Some of the rabbis don't even seem to understand what is meant by oral sex and mutual masturbation.

One of the interviewees is David from Los Angeles, a bright and articulate man in his late 30s who, following the advice of a rabbi, tried for many years to change his orientation through therapy. He talks without bitterness about the advice given to him by various rabbis to eat figs, snap a rubber band on his wrist or bite his tongue whenever he feels the temptation to have sex with another man. Now twenty years later, David confronts the rabbi who ordered him into therapy and tells him that his advice did not work.

There is also Michelle, a Hasidic lesbian from Brooklyn who married under pressure from the family that now virtually disowns her. Many of the people interviewed are afraid to reveal their names and faces on camera because of the threat of family and community rejection. One of the angriest is Israel, a 58-year-old man from New York who rejected his family after they forced him to undergo electro-shock therapy. Others interviewed include Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi and author of the book Of Wrestling with God and Men. Greenberg talks with hope about God being lovingly open to questioning and to learning from man. He says there is an alternate way of interpreting the passage from Leviticus, but we are not told what this is.

Trembling Before G_d is about being gay, but is also about the need to belong -- to parents, to community, to a set of rules. It is heartbreaking when Israel says, "I'm 58 years old and I want my Daddy," and extremely moving when he finally telephones his 98-year-old father after twenty years of estrangement. In an odd way, the documentary celebrates Judaism even while pointing out its flaws and it got me back in touch with the Jewish experience -- the songs, the feeling of community, and the struggle to understand God and His purposes. The real sadness was thinking about centuries of intolerance practiced by those who themselves have been victims. Trembling Before G_d illuminates the problem but does not show us a way out, yet if given enough exposure it just might become a wake-up call for those still tied to an archaic belief system that long ago ceased to have any relevance or purpose.

©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene