The fullness of life: 3 films at the 67th Berlinale

Unfolding from February 9 to 19, the 67 Berlinale hit the ground running on Thursday.  Already by day three, there are plenty of films to write about, from the Competition and Panorama sections I have attended so far. Two films have made a strong impression On Body and Soul (Hungary), directed by Ildikó Enyedi, and Félicité (Congo/Senegal/ France/Germany), by Alain Gomis. We teach our students that cinema, as a medium rooted in the material world, can reproduce photographically and in movement what we perceive through our senses.  The supreme challenge, we hammer in also, is to create the intangible world of the spirit through the materiality of images and sounds.  This is done, as Paul Schrader described in his study of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, through the ‘transcendental style’.  I should add a third film to these comments, the Austrian comedy of manners Wild Mouse, written, directed and starring Josef Hader, because in the tragicomic escalations of a lies told out of embarrassment, much is said about a more abstract topic, the state of the self in times of flux, as rendered by plot, staging and dialogue, and the rhetorical device of the synecdoche.

I watch the competition films as a tabula rasa: before the light goes off in the spectacular Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz, I don’t know the title, the director, the country of origin, and I haven’t read any reviews.  The film has to win me over by its formal merits and by the manner– paraphrasing Lillian Gish in the 2008 Brownlow documentary on Griffith – it deals with the human experience.  Interestingly, all three pictures, On Body and Soul, Félicité and Wild Mouse are concerned with the fullness of life, and how pain, suffering and loss are factored in the equation.

Body and Soul poetically connects the animal world – in its natural beauty, seen in a winter forest, but also in its subjugation to man, a slaughter house clinically observed  – with the realm of human interactions.  It does so in an unexpected way, mysteriously hinted in the eye-catching opening sequence. The deer and the doe in the woods stare at us, and their recurring presence is explained as a dream, uncannily shared every night by a restrained, rational middle-aged manager in the slaughter house (Géza Morcsányi), and a younger, emotionally damaged, semi-autistic new beef quality control employee (Alexandra Borbély). Their quirky, tentative courtship and romance blossoms in a wickedly funny and imaginative handling of the plot, with a sense of humor that is both dry and poignant.  The director talked about her goal of depicting the  ‘fullness of life’ , the complete picture of a person’s existence, in the well-attended press conference after the press screening. It is through the lingering close ups of the protagonists'faces that the full connection between beauty and a love that accepts flaws and pain is finally established, allegorically through the repeated dream, and dramatically in the climax, a little jewel of timing and nuance. 

Shot in verité style in Kinshasa with two simultaneous hand-held cameras, Félicité is a slow-burning portrait of a fierce woman, who ekes out a living singing in a rowdy café, reacting to the motorcycle accident of her teenage boy, with shock and numbness. There is a fully developed and class-conscious world around the proud Félicité, with the cameras capturing the chaos of Congo’s capital. The director Alain Gomis, an auteur whose art house work has been made possible through European sources, like the World Film Fund, attached to the Berlinale, roots this woman (Véro Tshanda Beya) in the realistic environment we have seen in previous generations of African filmmakers. But his contribution - à la Apichatpong Weerasethakul I thought - is to place her in a background of animistic beliefs, shown but not explained, coexisting with a French cultural and linguistic varnish.  It is proposed as a recurrent dream set in a primordial river and a strangely patterned zebra, that the protagonist embraces at the end as a source of vital strength. This surreal encounter, beyond the physical reality and reminiscent of Uncle Boonmee, triggers Felicité’s acceptance of life’s limitations.  Like On Body and Soul, the uncanny is the bridge connecting the material and the spiritual realms.  To further the connection, Gomis intercuts through the film a choir singing with great beauty; it is a Greek chorus outside of the action but integral to it. The human experience has been illuminated by the weaving of the real, the magical and the impact of musical beauty.

Wild Mouse is a comedy of manners and matrimony built on an escalation beginning with the white lie a well-established music critic in Vienna (Josef Hader) tells his wife (Pia Hierzegger), to avoid disclosing that he has lost his job in a prestigious newspaper.  The lie grows unmanageable when the protagonist – a volcan of pent-up rage underneath superb manners – embarks on a path of revenge against the newspaper publisher. The comedy is so well planted on the everyday of a well-put together intellectual that unravels, and the acting so well timed, that the absurdities piling up seem to flow effortlessly. The comedy goes beyond marital troubles to offer a satirical description of all Austrian society grappling with an unstable world that destabilizes identity and vital purpose.  The current political anxiety gripping Europe is present, but kept in the background, on television.   The matrimonial crisis of two sophisticated professionals in Vienna brings up a memory of Freud – the wife is a therapist – and is resolved at the end in a lovely metaphor of cars blocked in traffic finally able to move. Manners and what they cloak is what the film tackles with dry humor, and the ending brings a breath of optimism.

For these three very different films the common point of departure is that we are truly ourselves when we accept our warts and imperfections.  They are works of philosophical optimism.

"Dos tipos de cuidado", with Pedro Infante & Jorge Negrete, at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles presented Dos tipos de cuidado (1953) at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles on June 15, as part of the 2016 "Last Remaining Seats" series, organized by the Los Angeles Conservancy.

Below are the program notes I wrote for this very funny Mexican comedy. 

(A generous dose of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete movies is good for the soul!  I list a few of their films at the end, easily available in YouTube, Amazon and other web merchants, besides being a perennial staple in the Spanish-language television channels.

Dos tipos de cuidado [Two Troublemakers] is considered one of the best of examples of comedia ranchera, the hugely popular genre of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age.  For the first and only time, a film paired two singers and movie stars of phenomenal wattage: Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante. It would be Negrete’s last film before his untimely death in Los Angeles in 1953, and one of Infante’s most affectionate representations of Mexican manhood, before his also untimely death in a plane crash in 1957.

The comedia ranchera, a cowboy musical whose formula crystalized with the enormously successful Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936), directed by Fernando de Fuentes, combines elements of comedy, drama, tragedy and popular music in a romanticized rural setting, laced with folkloric and patriotic themes.  Like other popular genres of the Golden Age – spanning the thirties to the fifties – the ranchera comedy reflects the Mexican fascination for melodrama, a hybrid between humor and tragedy, where emotions take center stage and establish a deep bond with popular audiences, who understand comic and dramatic situations involving family, gender roles, work, traditions, faith, and life as a valley of tears. Like other popular genres – the family melodrama, the urban melodrama, the historical epic, the comedian comedy – the ranchera comedies are a mirror that reflects Mexicanness as it was understood and lived across the social spectrum in an era that coincided with the studio-based cinema of the Golden Age.

Dos tipos de cuidado is an exceptionally interesting example of comedia ranchera in that it shows a more realistic setting, not the countryside but a provincial town as a place of transition challenged by modern living, symbolized by the automobile. Also, the protagonists bring to the film two very different public personas: Infante is an icon representing the popular and traditional, mostly in urban comedies (Nosotros los pobres (1948) ATM!! (1951), Ansiedad (1953), while Negrete’s aristocratic demeanor embodies the “noble, valiant and loyal” charro, quoting one of his signature songs, El charro mexicano. Thus, the enduring friendship of the protagonists – male friendship trumps all, is the theme of the film – shows aspects of Mexican manhood that have made some critics read as a deconstruction of Hispanic maleness. 

Audiences over the years have glossed over this interpretation, and enjoyed the screwball elements of the story, its clever narrative twist, the comic relief characters, and above all, the wonderful song and dance numbers.

A lively ten-minute prologue sets the context: Pedro Malo (Pedro Infante) and Jorge Bueno (Jorge Negrete) are best buddies proud of their womanizing reputation, who love each other’s sister Maria (Yolanda Varela) and cousin Rosario (Carmelita Martínez), and propose to them during a picnic in the countryside. After a romantic tug-of-war, with slapstick touches, Rosario accepts Jorge’s proposal, and Maria, Pedro’s. But when the film jumps a year later to the birth of Rosario’s baby girl, after the credit sequence, we see that she has married Pedro, her cousin, thus breaking up the buddies’ friendship.  A comedy of errors ensues, with the audience left to make sense of the progressively more outrageous turn of events, that involves a pompous general and an unnamed (and presumed venereal) disease the creates plot mayhem.

One hour into the film, however, the buddies patch up their friend in a key off screen scene, and the story changes direction, with the audience still in the dark until the surprising twist revealed in the picture’s climax.  A few minutes before the song-and-dance grand finale, the couples get reconfigured, with a verbal coda delivered at breakneck speed by Rosario’s father’s that stops short of its absurdly incestuous conclusions.

Written by Carlos Orellana, cast as the Lebanese father of Rosario, who steals the scenes with his common sense observations about questionable male behavior served in mangled Spanish, Dos tipos de cuidado is built like a spool of wool that gets bigger and more tangled as the misunderstandings accumulate.  The visual motif of animal horns attached Pedro, perceived as a henpecked husband, is a source of comedy – and one of the reason for understanding the film as a undermining Mexican macho behavior.

Director Ismael Rodríguez, who also co-wrote the film, is rightfully credited for managing what must have been a challenging project, with two major stars (think Madonna and Michael Jackson together in a film, or The Rolling Stones and The Beatles in a concert), conscious of their artistic personas and their fan base, and also the subject of a press-manufactured rivalry.  He directs the film with a freshness and warmth that has stood the test of time.  Rodríguez and Infante worked successfully together before and after Dos tipos de cuidado and Nosotros, los pobres, in some well-remembered titles of the Golden Age: Ustedes, los ricos (1948), Los tres huastecos (1948), Los tres García (1948), A toda máquina!! (1951), Pepe el Toro (1953), and Infante’s intriguing last film Tizoc (1957).

The best scenes of Dos tipos de cuidado are, for my money, those where music and songs are used for characterization and to advance the screwball elements of the plot.  There are nine songs in the typical settings of comedias rancheras: parties, community gatherings and cantinas. The serenade scene, for example, begins with the f Pedro and Jorge each singing with a mariachi group, shown one after the other linked by a swish span.  The rest of the sequence is a nicely rendered split screen, where they both seem to be on the same space, singing the same song, in a romantic crescendo.  Also lovely is the singing duel in the engagement party, where Negrete’s more powerful tenor voice tends to overshadow Infante’s less robust but charming performance. Infante’s rendition of the song La tertulia celebrating the birth of his daughter (the key to the misunderstanding) is a triumph of staging and comedy: a cantina where ladies of questionable decency (‘chamacotas’) toast to the niceties of tradition and family values.  One last example is Negrete singing another signature song, Quiubo, quiubo cuándo?  in the flashback scene that supposedly explains Rosario’s defection to the other friend. 

Screened in downtown Los Angeles – where Mexican cinema was a staple for many decades – Dos tipos de cuidado will allow audiences to enjoy in the big screen the only film made together by two great Mexican stars.  Their cinema is still immensely entertaining, and it’s a measure of their enduring success that Infante and Negrete’s prolific film and music career is easily available today in the multiple-DVD and CD collections carried by Walmart in its Hispanic media section, on Spanish-language television, Amazon, and of course YouTube. Cinephilia is made easy by modern means of distribution.

________

Essential books and other films with Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante

Javier Millán Agudo, Jorge Negrete: Ser charro no basta (2011)

Carlos Monsiváis, Pedro Infante: Las leyes del querer (2008)

Jorge Negrete

Ay Jalisco … no te rajes! (1941)

Fiesta (1941, his only Mexican film)

Cuando quiere un mexicano (1944)

Me he de comer esa tuna (1945)

Gran Casino (1947)

El jorobado (1943)

Allá en el Rancho Grande (1949)

Una gallega en Mexico (1949)

El rapto (1954)

Pedro Infante

Ahora soy rico (1942)

La razón de la culpa (1943)

Mexicanos al grito de guerra (1943)

Vuelven los García! (1947)

Angelitos negros (1948)

Qué te ha dado esa mujer?! (1951)

A 'moving' icon: Revisiting Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004)

It’s Good Friday 2016, and after coming back home from the liturgy of the Passion of the Lord (the only day of the year when no mass is celebrated) I asked myself if Mel Gibson’s film could be viewed as a fruitful means of contemplating the Passion story.  Can it function as an icon, a moving icon that is, to relive and remember an extra-ordinary time and event that shapes the identity of a Christian, a follower of the Christ?  Is this particular film a suitable channel to open up the senses and the heart so that we can grasp the transcendent, through a glass darkly, quoting St Paul and the Swede who wrestled with God?

This question invited a comparison with two recent films that take the Lord’s Passion as their central narrative device but apply it to protagonists that finds themselves walking in the shoes of the Lord:  The Irish Calvary (2014), written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, and the German Kreuzweg (The Stations of the Cross, 2014), directed by Dietrich Brüggemann and co-written with his sister Anna. Like and Andrzej Wajda’s Die Karwoche (Holy Week, 1995), these works approach the human condition from a New Testament premise: What does it mean for each of us individually, that we have been ransomed, literally, by the blood of Christ on the cross?  

In these cases, the point of departure is primarily intellectual, a proposal to the mind first, and the heart second, that creates a parallel with the salvation story. With great cinematic beauty, these films retrace the steps of the Passion, and by building an analogy with present-day protagonists make the Passion as a historical event transcend time and place.  Calvary and Kreuzweg propose an intellectual experience, much like Kieslowski and his screenwriter did with their television series Dekalog in 1989-1990, inviting the viewer to consider the relevance and implications of the Ten Commandments in Communist Poland at the time.

The Mel Gibson film invites the viewer, I believe, an entirely different ballgame.  It functions like an icon, a devotional moving image, that through its visual and sound form transports the Christian believer – and perhaps other viewers of good will - to a transcendental dimension, triggering a religious experience. This Passion helps us move beyond the boundaries of place and time, Palestine in Roman times, to make us see how the Lord’s universal mission comes to fulfillment.  It is a theological lesson, like the sculptures of the cathedrals in the middle ages.

The nature of cinema allows us to be there, re-living with tight shots, parallel editing, expressionistic cinematography and the use of Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, the experience of the twelve hours between the anguished prayer of Christ in the olive orchard his until his death on the cross, from a Thursday evening to Friday afternoon.

The film’s relentless violence is a major obstacle:  one thing is to read the Gospel’s account of floggings, beatings and nails, but something different is to see their gruesome unfolding on screen.   Gregory Wolfe wrote about this in Image magazine in 2004: “The strongest defense for the use of violence in this film is the issue of sacramentality, the Christian belief that the Incarnation hallows our human, corporeal condition.  In the history of the church, Christ is always being etherealized, rendered comfortably abstract, by liberals and conservatives. One of the enduring strengths of The Passion is its use of gesture, touch, and gaze to convey presence”.  He also notes that Gibson’s ‘blood and gusts sacramentality’ has been questioned, asking “But what other kind is there? If God cannot become present in blood, guts, shit, piss, semen, saliva – He vanishes into the ether.  In short, this is not the Messiah of the Jesus Seminar, who increasingly seems to resemble a divinity being graded on a curve.  In his New York Times op-ed on the film, Kenneth Woodward aptly quoted the famous formula coined by theologian H. Richard Niebuhr to criticize the modern therapeutic vision of Christianity: A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”.

Reenactment of the Crucifixion, San Fernando,
Philippines, Holy Week 2013,
Reuters-AFP

Understood as sacramental, the film’s violence can be integrated into the story; its brutality is the necessary condition to understand the magnitude of the sacrifice. I would like to argue that the Hispanic artistic and religious sensibility, grounded in realism, seems better able to handle it: think of the recreations of the Passion in Spain, Latin America and the Philippines during Holy Week. In contrast, when I attended an Easter play in my neighborhood evangelical church in 2004, the Crucifixion barely registered as a quick tableau, en route to the Resurrection.

The Passion of the Christ – 12 years after its release during Holy Week 2004 – still posits itself – daringly – as an icon.  It shows how film language is fully capable to show both the human and divine nature of the Lord. A handful of flashbacks meaningfully link the horror of the suffering with the beauty and depth of Christ’s life and teachings. The essential of the message is all there - the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper – in the crosscutting technique that is at the heart of classic storytelling, from Griffith on.  The camera work and mise-en-scène are designed to implicate the viewer, emotionally and intellectually, whether it is Judas throwing the bag of silver coins to the camera in slow motion or the sorrowful look of the Virgin Mary briefly breaking the fourth wall, from the foot of the Cross. 

The supernatural elements of the film – an artistic license in the spirit of the sacred text, as I see it – are both scary and eloquent bearers of theological meaning: the ugliness of sin and the sordid workings of the devil.  Satan is imagined as an androgynous character, a woman with the voice of a man, tempting Christ in the opening sequence in Gethsemane to question his mission and filiation; and once again, on the way to the cross, cradling a hairy monster dwarf. These are old imaginative strokes to visualize what the Gospel does not describe.

The most stunning marriage of visual and teaching – the theological linchpin of the film, and its dramatic climax – is the point-of-view shot from high up, where a tear is shown coming down from the sky/heaven (the same word in Spanish, cielo), and when it hits the ground, causes darkness, a quake and the veil of the Temple to tear in the middle, dramatically described by Matthew in chapter 27, verses 51 to 53. 

The Passion of the Christ makes the sacred story into an icon for our times, fully modern in its sound, fury and desecrations of beauty and goodness.  And yet it also belongs to a Christian artistic tradition that has depicted the Last Supper and the Crucifixion together, to show us how unimaginably deep is God’s love for us.  

After viewing The Passion of the Christ, I asked a dear friend in Buenos Aires, Suzi Fauth, to paint me an icon from a monastery in Malula, Syria, dated 1778, that makes this theological point with great beauty. 

Clinging to the Cross - Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004)

 In the April 2004 issue of Criterio magazine, an Argentine journal of Catholicism, culture and politics, for which I have been writing since 1981, I published a review of The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson. It was a film that reached me deeply.  And since I have revisited the film this Holy Week, I upload the 2004  article below.

El 25 de febrero, Miércoles de Ceniza, se estrenó en Estados Unidos La Pasión de Cristo, el filme dirigido por Mel Gibson, el actor/director norteamericano que quiso brindar – costeada por su bolsillo – un testimonio de fe católica.  El lector de Criterio que tenga la buena voluntad de leer esta reseña se encontrará no sólo con la crítica cinematográfica de una obra de indudable valor artístico, sino también con el testimonio de una experiencia personal y profunda frente a un film visceral.

 Los medios de comunicación han dado amplia cuenta, durante el rodaje, la post-producción y las proyecciones previas al estreno (incluso una para el Papa), de la tormenta creada por la película.  En Estados Unidos, la polémica ha sido agria, y generada  por la combustión de elementos disímiles:  el contexto anti-cristiano, o post-cristiano desde el que operan los grandes medios de comunicación, la acusación de anti-semitismo, y una campaña publicitaria exitosa entre la feligresía protestante evangélica y los católicos.  El resultado ha sido, durante la primera semana de su estreno, una extraordinaria repercusión de taquilla.  Un filme que costó 25 millones de dólares, recaudó en los primeros cinco días 117 millones.  Lo cual demuestra, entre otras cosas, que en el marco de lo que aquí se llama “the culture wars”, la confrontación deológica de valores morales y políticos en la arena pública – simplificando, conservadores versus liberales, Bush y Kerry, en la próxima contienda electoral – la película es avalada por una mayoría conectada con y por el tema y mensaje de la película.  El establishment liberal rabia y tira dardos contra Gibson y la película, mientras que un público calculado en más de cien millones sigue pagando con gusto los siete dólares de la entrada.  Hollywood, por su parte, está desconcertado con lo que intepretó desde el vamos como un “vanity project” del director, y que no tuvo interés en financiar o apoyar con distribución.

            

La Pasión de Cristo es una obra de gran audacia artística, desde una visión ortodoxamente católica (terreno de teólogos y no críticos de cine), que brinda al creyente una experiencia radical y brutal del sufrimiento de Jesús de Getsemaní al Gólgota.

En las páginas de Criterio habrá un análisis del costado teológico y bíblico cuando se estrene el filme en la Argentina. Y no es mi intención aquí ser redudante o pretenciosa.  Mis observaciones sobre la ortodoxia católica son las de una creyente, y como tal quisiera que fueran leídas.  

Desde el punto de vista cinematográfico, La Pasión de Cristo representa un uso maduro e inteligente del lenguaje visual y sonoro del medio.  Los aciertos comienzan, a mi juicio, con la concepción del guión, que no es una combinación reverente o estrictamente literal de los cuatro Evangelios.  Aun cuando sea una “versión” de los Evangelios, la visión artística ha buscado sujetarse al texto y al espíritu de la Pasión.  Quienes recuerden La Pasión según Mateo (1964), de Pasolini, o La Ultima tentación de Cristo (1988) verán immediatamente las semejanzas (los tres fueron proyectos muy personales de sus realizadores) y también sus profundas diferencias: en Pasolini, el impulso marxista, y en Scorsese, a través de la novela de Kazantzakis, la confección de un Cristo confundido, que adquiere conciencia de su misión salvífica recién en la cruz. 

           

Gibson y su co-guionista Benedict Fitzgerald se han tomado una gran libertad artística, por ejemplo, en imaginar realísticamente al demonio y colocarlo como espectador de la Pasión, de comienzo al fin, en paralelo y contraste dramático con la figura de la Virgen María..  Es una mujer, calva y con voz de varón, que tienta al Señor en el Huerto de los Olivos para que desespere, reaparece en la flagelación, la Via Dolorosa y la Crucifixión, una vez más con la tentación de la desesperación.  Al final lleva en brazos un enano deforme y viejo, representación gráfica – como los orcos de Tolkien – de los estragos del pecado.  La desesperación de Judas también está “materializada” en la persona de dos niños malvados, de horrible semblante, que lo hostigan hasta la escena del suicidio, junto al buñueliano esqueleto de un burro cubierto de moscas.  La “materialización” del mal y su hostigamiento del bien (como en Tolkien y la versión cinematográfica de Peter Jackson) es la manera artística como se plantea el conflicto entre el bien y el mal con que abre San Juan su Evangelio.  

Este choque entre dos fuerzas poderosas – que culmina con la victoria de la Resurrección – provee el arco dramático del filme, cuyo clímax está dado con profunda belleza y emoción en el momento que Cristo entrega su espíritu.  Gibson ha imaginado que Dios Padre deja caer una lágrima desde el cielo: la cámara, colocada muy en alto, sobre las tres cruces del Gólgota, sigue en cámara lenta la trayectoria de esa lágrima y cuando ésta toca las rocas del suelo estalla el terremoto que marca la muerte de Cristo.  El impacto es monumental.

            

El desarrollo cronológico de la Pasión – otro de los hallazgos del filme – está entrecortado por breves flashbacks, dos de los cuales son licencias poéticas para trasmitir no sólo la profunda y tierna relación entre Cristo y su madre sino la humanidad del Señor durante sus años de treinta años de vida oculta, como hijo y carpintero de profesión.  Los otros flashbacks tienen una misión importante, “materializar” el sentido de la obra y dar el contexto a personajes como María Magdalena, ofreciéndonos – sin palabras – su punto de vista.  Pero donde los flashbacks y la técnica del montaje – la piedra angular del lenguaje cinematográfico – alcanzan su punto culminante es el diseño del clímax:  la Crucifixión alterna con la Ultima Cena y la institución de la Eucaristía.  Para el espectador creyente, este montaje en paralelo (presente desde D.W.Griffith en los albores del cine) hace explícito y contundente  – “materializa”, una vez más – el sentido de la Pasión, y de esta película:  el Cuerpo y la Sangre de Cristo se entregan para la salvación de todos.  Y no se necesita ser teólogo para comprender la dimension del sacrificio, y la responsabilidad de cada uno en la muerte del Señor.

Otro de los hallazgos es el uso de arameo, hebreo y latín – lenguas inaccesibles para el espectador común – porque, al desfamiliarizar la experiencia lingüística, se contextualiza históricamente la puesta en escena (aun cuando el latín de muchos actores tenga una pronunciación italiana, y detalles de la ambientación no sean del todo verosímiles, según los expertos).  Contemplar una historia tan entrañable y familiar entendiendo algunas palabras o frases del Evangelio – Eli, Eli! Lemá sabactaní?, Ecce Homo – es una fuente de gran emoción, porque el espectador se imbrinca en el drama desarrollado frente a sus ojos.  Incluso, el breve intercambio inicial entre la Virgen y María Magdalena es una transcripción literal del texto pascual judío – “Por qué es esta noche tan especial? Porque es la noche donde fuimos salvados”.  Desde una perspectiva cristiana, el uso de este texto, simultáneamente universaliza la Pasión e incorpora sus raíces judías.

 El sufrimiento físico y las vejaciones morales del Señor está presentadas con un realismo escalofriante.  De allí que, quien percibe la brutalidad del castigo y la mecánica de la crucifixión – interminables - fuera de un contexto cristiano, puede salir del cine escandalizado o perplejo sobre la finalidad del filme.  Pero si se aferra a las últimas palabras del Cristo moribundo, “Señor, perdónalos porque no saben lo que hacen”, el sentido esencial del cristianismo le llegará al corazón.

 La decisión de utilizar actores no conocidos para el gran público trabaja a favor del filme, ya que son tablas rasas que devienen los personajes tan familiares del Evangelio: al seguirse una iconografía tradicional, renacentista, es fácil identificar a cada uno.  La actriz rumana Maia Morgenstern (Estrella de la mañana, o Lucero del alba, en un bello caso de coincidencia poética entre el nombre y el personaje) encarna a la Madre de Dios de manera conmovedora.  Una de las experiencias más hondas de esta Pasión es seguir la relación de Cristo con su madre.  La elección del actor norteamericano Jim Caviezel para interpretar a Cristo también fue feliz, no sólo porque tiene el physique du role – su Jesús es un carpintero acostumbrado al trabajo duro - sino por la luminosidad interior desde la que compone el personaje.

            

Dejo de lado el tema del supuesto antisemitismo de La Pasión de Cristo, porque en mi percepción no lo hay.  En un nivel puramente fáctico, en la película, salvo Pilatos y los romanos, todos los demás son  judíos, y los hay buenos y malos.  El filme no incita al odio ni a la venganza, ni habla de culpas colectivas per saecula saeculorum.  Es verdad que no hay manera de presentar al Sanhedrín como inocente del drama que desencadenó, y sí, Anás y Caifás son los villanos de la historia.  Pero interviene la licencia poética para presentar a un sumo sacerdote que se retira disgustado por lo sórdido del procedimiento, iniciado entre gallos y medias noches. 

            

Participar de La Pasión de Cristo, en un cine de barrio y envuelto en el fragor cotidiano, es embarcarse, misteriosamente, en una experiencia que no puede calificarse sino de religiosa.  Pero es lo que ocurre cuando – recordando el concepto griego de “teatro”, una forma de contemplación – los espectadores creyentes asisten al sobrecogedor drama de la Pasión, Muerte y Resurrección de Quien da sentido a nuestra vida