‘El Crimen del padre Amaro’ causes a stir

A lot of people aren’t going to like “El Crimen del padre Amaro” (“The Crime of Father Amaro”). In fact, a lot of people already don’t. The movie has been surrounded by controversy since its release in Mexico and has since been boycotted by the Catholic Church. The problems the church has with the film are quite clear. Upon viewing the film, but that isn’t to say that the criticism is founded.

Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal, ” Y tu mama tambien”) is a young, attractive priest who is sent out by the local bishop to work along side another priest in a small, corrupt Mexican town. He arrives with purity written all over his face. His desire to do good is plain to see, but he is soon brought out of the delusions of the purity of his town almost upon his arrival. He quickly finds that Father Benito, the priest he has been sent to work with, is both having an affair with a local woman and using drug money to build a clinic (he excuses this by saying “we shouldn’t be too picky using drug money for good works”). Then he finds that another priest whom he admires is accused of being in league with guerrillas. All of this weighs heavily on the purity of this young priest, until he meets a devout young woman who also happens to be the daughter of the woman his mentor is sleeping with.

While a lot of the press and advertisement has been (of course) focusing on the sexual side of “El Crimen del padre Amaro,” what is getting everyone so up in arms is the portrayal of the clergy as being less than divine. This is most timely, as the Catholic Church is now under the microscope for their questionable indiscretions. Father Amaro falls into this now-notorious story as he begins sleeping with, and eventually impregnating, his sixteen-year-old mistress. What becomes even more shocking than this, however, is his reaction to her pregnancy: he refuses to marry and give up his career and later he feigns ignorance of a death to keep himself safely within the church.

Along with director Carlos Carrera’s straight-forward storytelling, Gael Garcia Bernal is what really makes the movie work as well as it does. His innocence is apparent early on, and you can see him struggle with his new-found knowledge of corruption and lies that he finds everywhere. He at first reminds us of a man who comes from the country to see, for the first time, the skyline of New York City. Father Amaro has that same innocence about him, that same bewilderment and fragility. But his awakening is not to industrialization; it’s to the fact that the church is not only about faith; it’s also about politics. It’s already certain that this film will live a healthy life in Mexico, as it’s become their highest grossing film to date, but it will be interesting to see how it will play out in international markets. It’s definitely not just a film about religion and seduction, but rather an overwhelming scope of innocence lost to both politics and love.

In one scene, a man speaking to Father Amaro describes the town and its people best when he says, “The devil came to this town many years ago. He built his lair here.”

Rating: 3 stars