In the name of (2013)

Despite some terrible clichés, In the name of is an engaging film about being closeted. The cliché: the main character is a tormented priest. He's gay and he lives in a rural community where he works with delinquent kids. He falls in love with a boy and their relationship must remain secret. The cliché: sexual temptation and self-destructive behavior. For all this, Malgoska Szymowska is a good storyteller in the sense that she builds a tight world around the priest - a world of macho performance among the teenagers he is assigned to tend to. Most of all, In the name of is a film about self-denial. The relation between religious rumination and suffering, a quest for selflessness, is of course no less clichéd, but at least at times, Szymowska makes us believe in the character and his anxiety. Some of the scenes depicting the priests' unhappiness turn into grim comedy: we see the priest in a severely intoxicated state, alone in his barren apartment, taking a waltz with a portait of pope Benedict. I have mixed feelings about this film: the portrayal of self-loathing gays tends to become an easy path to make a film about Misery, World-weariness and Decay in general. When directors walk this path, the representation of sexuality is often reduced to a pattern of bodily temptations, so that the logic of the film is a subject and then there is an object of desire, a manifestation of this "temptation". In this film: taciturn guy with Jesus-looks. In most cases, this pattern is both boring and repulsive (a miserabilist distortion) and gives rise to many suspect images of homosexuality. However, the film has some strength in how it conjures up the closed world inhabited by the priest.  

Diabel (1972)

Oh boy, what a crazy mess Diabel is. This little-known Polish costume drama by Andrzey Zulawski  is a surreal tale about .... about ... well I am not sure what, but my guess is communist authoritarian madness, even though the film is set in 18th century Prussian takeover of Poland. I can tell you this (as a warning perhaps), this is not your ordinary cozy historical piece. Diabel is unruly and hallucinatory. We are presented with a young man who is released from a prison in the midst of fierce war events. The man, followed by the mysterious stranger that released him, returns to his home place. Depravity - everywhere. The young man, we are led to think, is a decent fellow really but somehow he is goaded into these horrid actions. The world the film evokes is out-of-this-world gorey. Nothing makes sense, except for a solid chain of events that turn bad into worse. Indecent acts are committed and blood is flowing everywhere. Cinematically, every image has a murky and unsettling quality to it. Zulawski evokes a world in which nobody in particular seems to know what is going on - except for the mysterious stranger. This is brought home by the frenzied camera work and eerie kraut-y music. The entire film thunders with an immense sense of rage. Everything in this world seems to be the product of a moralism that has no real grasp of morality.