Priest (1995) by Antonia Bird 

In which an attractive Catholic priest newly assigned to a parish finds his idealism (to wit: illusions) colliding with the church’s compromises and hypocrisy while becoming aware of his own forbidden homo-erotic longings.

 

Based on a story about as fraught with meaning and conflict as is conceivable--more than than we have a right to expect even of a melodrama--Antonia Bird's Priest packs a wallop. It may be a very good rather than a great film (a circumstance I will attempt to account for below), but ultimately its value as a distillation of enduringly relevant themes outweighs its formal short-comings. Bird's courageous treatment of a fraught subject matter guarantees the film continued relevance, however cynical Christ's flock becomes about its church.  

I was shattered by Bird's film on my initial viewing, which came during a period when being shattered at the cinema [thanks to films like Tavernier’s Béatrice, Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, August's Pelle the Conqueror, von Trier's Europa, and Rohmer's L'Ami de mon Ami] was a regular occurrence. I wouldn't hesitate to call it one of the most significant films of its decade, and certainly the most unflinching film ever made about the Catholic church's central thematic--if not by intention, by the accidents of history--: the love of man for man in all his valences. 

Bird's film deals with a smorgasbord of issues. Beside the specifically Catholic dilemma of whether celibacy is God’s will, it considers the nature of a religious vocation; under what circumstances the seal of the confessional may be broken; by whose power the church excludes; how far the authority of the institution extends into congregants' lives; what sin, loyalty, justice, and forgiveness signify, etc.  The fact that it embroiders this quilt of themes with the thread of homoerotic desire should have guaranteed its banning. Alas, we live in a world where truth, however blasphemous, will out. Through its ministry and the office of the confessional the church itself helped create our openness to all things hidden in shame.

The film isn't equal to the depths evoked--and it would be foolish to expect it to be, as only a dissertation or novel could adequately address the themes in play. It is the nature of the cinematic beast that it must unfold intellectual conflict as a series of dramatic episodes. Priest has the merits of an exceptionally powerful British television drama. Since that alone puts it head and shoulders over the vast majority of psycho-dramas produced as feature films, it seems niggardly to withhold the final half star. Put it down to my focus on style, a focus central to critical evaluation but mostly irrelevant to the 'moral of the story,' and if Priest is emblematic of anything it is the tradition of the ethical focus of the English novel, which has never been content simply to describe moral turpitude.

Priest's shortcoming lies not in the performances, which are uniformly as good as they need to be, but its cadence. The impact of numerous scenes is undermined by sudden cuts away, as when Greg walks off into the countryside with his bicycle. To yield their maximal significance shots need holding. If there is no slackening of tension it’s hard to sustain must less augment interest. Just as an over-stimulating personality, a hypo-manic film induces withdrawal, while a self-contained one draws us into it. Great film-makers know how to exploit our desire to be absorbed by withholding information, the practice of diegetic entropy.  

Leaving aside the questionable selection of music, the basic shortcoming of Priest is the pace: the film seems at times to race through (or past) its plot-points, undermining our ability to take up residence in the interiors, landscapes and emotional states inhabited by the characters. It is, perhaps too much in the head and not enough in the body, a circumstance that invites comparison with Claire Denis' resolutely anti-expository mis-en-scène. The andante pace was likely suggested by the amount of character needing development, and the fact of the inherently ideological/intellectual nature of the conflict dramatized, which necessitated a lot of dialogue. In film psychological development does not occur through a privileged first-person narrative but must be revealed from one incident to another. 

 

To absorb the import of developing events momentum must be allowed to abate periodically. The ideal cadence increases gravity by reducing mobility, allowing events to resonate in such a way as to implicate us in the proceedings rather than leave us looking in from outside. (To be made aware of one's spectatorship always indicates a failure of absorption.) The point of character-driven drama is to transport us out of the role of the spectator and into the characters' (our alter-selves') perspective. 

During the initial viewing when we're trying to figure out what happens to whom, the unstinting pace serves that interest, but it short-changes anyone returning to immerse themself in Priest's characters and atmosphere, which turn out to be only sort of 'there.' In her desire to be 'in your face' politically provocative, Bird seems prepared to sacrifice nuances of character. It would have benefited from letting us get closer to the ordinariness of its personages, but this is only possible up to a point in a feature film. Priest could easily have been a two-part Masterpiece Theater production without exhausting its themes. 

That being said, what strikes one on second or third viewings may melt into insignificance on the fourth, whence the perspectival and tentative nature of this review. If one never steps into the same river twice, how could one be expected to do so with film unspooling at 24 frames a second?

Excursus:

Great acting does not a great film make. Greatness arises out of the happy convergence of sundry elements of the film-maker’s craft. In addition to the fortuities of location, casting and degree of thespian accomplishment, film style emerges through the interplay of cinematography, editing, and scoring (the audio dimension in general). Cinema is a Gesamtkunstwerk--a totality in which every element co-determines the effectiveness of the other. 

 

Styles range from minimal to maximal, a distinction which in no way corresponds to that between the artless and the artful. One can err on the side of stylistic poverty as well as stylistic excess. It is a supreme achievement of any art to conceal itself. A barrage of stylistic devices, on the other hand, tends to impress principally as a barbaric and tasteless over-determination of content. There are great examples of cinematic art at both ends of the spectrum. Both the use of flash-montage and hand-held camerawork at one extreme, and the aversion to cutting evinced by “slow cinema” at the other, constitute excesses of style that call attention to themselves rather than serving the emplotment of a story. It is easy to distinguish styles geared to impress from styles determined to erase any trace of style. The distinction partially corresponds to those techniques that raise the temperature of a film and those that lower it. One's preference for one or other convention is a question of age and temperament. 

Just as a Largo movement is ‘deeper’ than an Andante, a deliberately paced film gains the most traction in the least manipulative manner, affectively speaking. It determines the depth of the groove into which one's attentional needle drops, so to speak. The editing of a film doesn't have to be a dazzling display or completely seamless. The conspicuousness of editing may reflect both a shortcoming on the editor's part and the cultivated awareness of the critic. A discerning body will detect what is effective, though it may also resist being manipulated to feel a particular emotion.

The amount of cutting doesn’t stand in any symmetrical relation to whether a film is fast-paced or contemplative. A fast-paced action sequence shot in a single take will still be experienced as a Scherzo, while a long drawn out conversation chopped up into shot/counter-shot will retain its amplitude (and possible longueur). Though these examples that may also constitute exceptions to the rule (viz, that single takes augment amplitude and therewith decelerate momentum while discontinuous montage, as the name suggests, accelerates the sense of forward momentum by contrastive means.) A preference for the long take indicates a reluctance to be forced into seeing confrontation by purely formal means. In other words, a preference for ambiguity, continuity, and holism (totality). 

If the criterion of stylistic maximalism (Hawks, Orson Welles, Godard Fellini, Hitchcock, Kurosawa) were the measure of cinematic greatness, a lot of classical cinema [Preminger, Wyler, Besson, Ozon] would be out of the running. My own preference is for technique that does not call attention to itself. Kazan's America, America is an example of the exuberant maximalism that makes one forget the point of what one is watching.

Eisenstein observed that montage is the "nerve of cinema." And that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema." I accept those observations as axiomatic. But if montage generates conflict, it does so, as Bazin notes, by manipulating film sequences and the viewer's perception. There is something at once dazzling/captivating and deeply off-putting about rapid montage sequences. Like hand-held camera-work, it is the technique that allows for the least amount of reflection. This makes it the most cinematic and least novelistic aspect of film technique. 

Psycho-drama is the instance of maximal co-determination of character development and plot. As such, it’s the most perfectly satisfying kind of film for adults. 

There isn’t enough consideration given to the comings and goings of people in the real world in Priest. We are sort of plopped down in the middle of things. It is a film about ideas told in the style of a thriller. There are no formal introductions to places and people, though there are establishment shots. They just appear. The film is blunt and self-consciously in-your-face. As it moves into its concluding 15 minutes there's a noticeable relenting of the forward momentum. Greg’s stay in the country with Father Matthew is a little eddy in the torrent of conflicts and confrontations. A moment of coming to terms. The heart of great melodrama is as much about re-acting as about taking action, and here we are given an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the dilemma faced by both priests. It is a welcome respite. 

In conclusion, my reservations are largely but not merely formal. Form is content, after all. As any work of art, a film must make an impression and can do so only by selecting some aspect of the world from a particular angle. However, Priest may be seen as a thematically over-loaded film whose construction, perhaps fittingly and by a necessary constraint, is merely functional. But both of these considerations pale to insignificance in light of the tour de force Bird's drama of tortured consciences unleashes.