If you weren’t raised in Catholicism, one of the revelations the reporters of “Spotlight” stumble upon might have come as a surprise: that the Church maintains facilities where wayward priests are sent, places to practice penance and prayer for inappropriate behavior. Sometimes these priests are recycled back into parishes and schools.
In the new Chilean film “The Club,” we are introduced to one such facility, a brightly-painted house perched above the seacoast in a small town.
But this place isn’t intended to rehabilitate, or to put priests back into the population. This is the end of the road.
Inside the house live four sidelined clergymen and one defrocked nun. In the opening minutes, the film reveals nothing about why they’re in the house, instead offering a subplot about how the group is training a greyhound — “The only dog mentioned in the Bible” — to win local races.
The residents daydream about how the dog might compete in big-money events in Santiago, although how they will get the animal to the city is a mystery. There’s the faintest growl of comedy in these scenes, as though director Pablo Larraín might be toying with the idea of black humor at the very edge of acceptability.
Then, a dramatic entrance: Another disgraced priest arrives at the home. Sister Monica (the wicked-good Antonia Zegers, Larraín’s wife) gives this newcomer the house rules — she is evidently the boss of the place, although she has her own past transgressions to atone for — and suddenly the scene is interrupted by a disheveled man shouting in the street outside.
He calls himself Sandokan (Roberto Farías), and he goes into a litany of horrifyingly detailed sexual abuses against children — all recited at the top of his lungs. Sandokan has somehow followed the new priest to the house, and claims to be his victim.
The scene is shocking and exhausting; it’s like a reverse exorcism, performed by a lay person against priests, not couched in the hoodoo of Latin but in plain speech that spares us nothing.
In some ways “The Club” never matches this long, uncomfortable sequence. In its aftermath, another arrival — this time an investigator from the Vatican — changes the dynamic yet again.
Father Garcia (Marcelo Alonso) is there to shut the place down, and he delves into the residents’ past behavior in a way that bursts their weird bubble of complacency. Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro, a Larraín regular), whom we already know as a fervent dog trainer and practiced liar, emerges as the most deluded and the most poignant of the residents.
In Larraín’s somber, drifting style, no conventional catharsis will be offered. We can only pay witness to the disintegration of this small world, and to the damage done when the truth is hidden in pleasant seaside houses.
Chilean filmmaker Larraín has been one of the most exciting talents of South American cinema in recent years, and his subject is invariably the derangement that occurs when reality is denied.
Chile’s relationship to the Pinochet dictatorship looms large in these films: “Tony Manero” is a creeped-out portrait of a 1970s sociopath (astonishing performance by Castro) trying to win a celebrity-impersonator context by memorizing John Travolta’s performance in “Saturday Night Fever”; “Post Mortem” looks at a morgue worker whose tunnel vision collides with history; and the Oscar-nominated “No” — by far Larraín’s most accessible movie — savors the ironies of a slick advertising guy prepping an anti-Pinochet election campaign.
Chile’s specific political context is only occasionally mentioned in “The Club,” but that doesn’t blunt Larraín’s fury at what happens when people willfully ignore the unignorable. (His next two films are in various stages of completion, and they sound tantalizing: a film about the early life of Pablo Neruda, and an English-language project about Jackie Kennedy.)
Murkier than Larraín’s other pictures, “The Club” is an uneven achievement, despite its powerful moments.
Still, the director is an eloquent image-maker, right from the opening shot: Father Vidal spinning on the beach, exercising his dog as the animal tirelessly runs around him. The scene is smoggy and damp, completely without joy, pointlessly going in circles — useful shorthand for Larraín’s vision of the world.
“The Club” 3 stars
On the Chile coast, a group of disgraced Catholic clergy live in a house meant for prayer and penance, although they don’t seem to be doing much of either. Pablo Larrain’s somber, drifting film offers no catharsis about these people, but it does contain some powerful, shocking sequences. In Spanish, with English subtitles.
Rating: Not rated; probably R for nudity, subject matter
Showing: SIFF Cinema Uptown
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