Jenny admires Pablo Larraín's unsettling meditation on hurt and guilt
How fascinating it is to compare this Chilean film with the American film Spotlight. The subject is the same: the misbehaviour of priests in the Catholic Church. To me, Spotlight seems to take a woefully self-righteous and one dimensional approach: those terrible priests and all their snaky supporters have to be tracked down and exposed! The good guys - those clever journos - must triumph!
The Club is different. It is set in an impoverished village at the edge of Chile. It is where the world of the living ends and the world of purgatory begins. In an ugly yellow coastal house there are four priests and a nun. The priests have been hidden away because they have committed various misdemeanours, not all of them child abuse. Their dismal lives are made more bearable by decent food, wine and by training their greyhound to win races, the proceeds of which they use to provide more comforts. Three strangers disrupt their routine. First, a fifth priest arrives but he brings in his trail his stalker, a dishevelled homeless man who posts himself outside the house to chant a continuous litany of foul and explicit description of just what this priest did to him. A suicide brings the third stranger, a dapper Jesuit who has come to investigate the death and to assess whether any of the inhabitants of the house will express genuine regret for their past actions.
The film is shot, and I’d love to know how this was achieved, in grimy shades of deep dusty grey tinged with a sandy brown haze, often against the light. The widescreen photography empties the landscape, stripping it of colour and life. Nothing looks clean, nor is it. These people do not feel remorse, they expertly justify their actions with skewed dogma and euphemism. They may feel shame but not guilt. Even the slyly smiling nun, theoretically monitoring their behaviour, for instance how long they spend in the shower (‘long showers are forbidden’) has herself been exiled for cruel behaviour.
It is easy to hate people who abuse their power seeing them in tabloid language as ‘evil beasts’. These priests seem dislikeable, certainly, but they are also forlorn creatures, silent in their unease with themselves, unable to connect even with their fellow ‘prisoners’, one of whom has advanced dementia and who has been there so long that no one can remember why he was sent in the first place. The group don’t care whether they impress their Jesuit interrogator or not. They tell him rudely that he is a Vatican bureaucrat, a nobody; they challenge him to say that he is without sin himself. And of course he cannot.
It has its sardonic moments of black humour which may remind people with long TV memories of Father Ted, an inspired late nineties Irish sitcom with three priests and a housekeeper banished to the fictional Craggy Island in the far West of Ireland. Here too we encounter dementia and foul language, visits from pompous and ineffectual church dignitaries, priests for whom religion provides only a job and a narrative to explain and excuse their actions. And as in Father Ted, the Church protects its own. But the vision The Club offers is darker and more profound. The film is a meditation on how often we hurt others, how little real care we give them, and the difficulty of acknowledging guilt.
The Club is more compelling in its set-up than in its plot. I found the final act especially contrived and unconvincing and if you’re not familiar with Catholic rituals you may be bemused, as I was, by the heavy symbolism. However, unlike Spotlight, this is a film that I continue to ponder; its images don’t fade.
How fascinating it is to compare this Chilean film with the American film Spotlight. The subject is the same: the misbehaviour of priests in the Catholic Church. To me, Spotlight seems to take a woefully self-righteous and one dimensional approach: those terrible priests and all their snaky supporters have to be tracked down and exposed! The good guys - those clever journos - must triumph!
The Club is different. It is set in an impoverished village at the edge of Chile. It is where the world of the living ends and the world of purgatory begins. In an ugly yellow coastal house there are four priests and a nun. The priests have been hidden away because they have committed various misdemeanours, not all of them child abuse. Their dismal lives are made more bearable by decent food, wine and by training their greyhound to win races, the proceeds of which they use to provide more comforts. Three strangers disrupt their routine. First, a fifth priest arrives but he brings in his trail his stalker, a dishevelled homeless man who posts himself outside the house to chant a continuous litany of foul and explicit description of just what this priest did to him. A suicide brings the third stranger, a dapper Jesuit who has come to investigate the death and to assess whether any of the inhabitants of the house will express genuine regret for their past actions.
The film is shot, and I’d love to know how this was achieved, in grimy shades of deep dusty grey tinged with a sandy brown haze, often against the light. The widescreen photography empties the landscape, stripping it of colour and life. Nothing looks clean, nor is it. These people do not feel remorse, they expertly justify their actions with skewed dogma and euphemism. They may feel shame but not guilt. Even the slyly smiling nun, theoretically monitoring their behaviour, for instance how long they spend in the shower (‘long showers are forbidden’) has herself been exiled for cruel behaviour.
It is easy to hate people who abuse their power seeing them in tabloid language as ‘evil beasts’. These priests seem dislikeable, certainly, but they are also forlorn creatures, silent in their unease with themselves, unable to connect even with their fellow ‘prisoners’, one of whom has advanced dementia and who has been there so long that no one can remember why he was sent in the first place. The group don’t care whether they impress their Jesuit interrogator or not. They tell him rudely that he is a Vatican bureaucrat, a nobody; they challenge him to say that he is without sin himself. And of course he cannot.
It has its sardonic moments of black humour which may remind people with long TV memories of Father Ted, an inspired late nineties Irish sitcom with three priests and a housekeeper banished to the fictional Craggy Island in the far West of Ireland. Here too we encounter dementia and foul language, visits from pompous and ineffectual church dignitaries, priests for whom religion provides only a job and a narrative to explain and excuse their actions. And as in Father Ted, the Church protects its own. But the vision The Club offers is darker and more profound. The film is a meditation on how often we hurt others, how little real care we give them, and the difficulty of acknowledging guilt.
The Club is more compelling in its set-up than in its plot. I found the final act especially contrived and unconvincing and if you’re not familiar with Catholic rituals you may be bemused, as I was, by the heavy symbolism. However, unlike Spotlight, this is a film that I continue to ponder; its images don’t fade.
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