Crime of Father Amaro (The) (2002)

This is a beautifully filmed, culturally dead-on story about faith and politics in small-town Mexico. Every detail of every scene accurately displays life in Mexico, down to the broken-doll shrines and subtle facial expressions of the town gossip that I call La Befana. Gael Garcia Bernal is handsome (even hunky) as a newly ordained priest and archbishop's favorite; right away, the most religious young woman in town (the beautiful and nubile Ana Claudia Talancon) is smitten with him. (Uh, oh.) Bernal dutifully minds his vows of chastity, but his will has apparently not been speaking with his feelings, so he eventually succumbs after temptation works its wiles on him subconsciously (or inscrutably -- Bernal may be handsome but he is not particularly expressive). The patriarchal parish priest (Sancho Gracia) has fallen from greater grace as he has wended his way through the loneliness of ministry and the pressures of the narcomafia. This film is about the pivotal points and the permanence of moral and esp. immoral decisions, and how one wrong turn can snowball down a slippery slope, even when serving selflessly in God's calling. (The true crimes, in my mind, belong to the archbishop, who uses Father Amaro to quash the truth and a young journalist's career in order to protect the church from scandal, and the church, which imposes celibacy on its pastors then sends them to minister solo in small towns.) Bernal, who disappointingly played a sniggering sex-obsessed adolescent in Y Tu Mama También, here plays a serious up-and-coming young pastor who regrettably begins to go bad -- yet sadly, this is not a concern of the archbishop. The conclusion should leave you sad and hanging -- not quite like when Darth Vader escaped after the destruction of the Death Star, because this is a human story (not a soap opera or a space opera), but one wonders if a sequel would be possible. Overall this movie is cinematically rich and filmed impeccably compared to Sex and Lucia, which is an emotionally more revealing and complex film. Four stars.