Burnt Offering

By JAY COCKS

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER Directed and Written by MARCO BELLOCCHIO

This is a viciously funny and profane social allegory set in a Catholic boys' school, through whose spare corridors the winds of anarchy and absurdism blow strong and cold. The school is the rough Italian equivalent of those penitentiary prep schools that Holden Caulfield complained about. Students are mostly delinquents saved from a rather more severe fate by the wealth of their parents. The place is run by priests who might politely be called eccentric. Most are incompetents or sadists. A couple are both.

In the Name of the Father is a kind of chilling, crazy dream tapestry woven out of the waking reveries of some of the students. A priest, death-obsessed, lectures a student from a coffin; a statue comes to life during chapel service, descends from her cornice and fervently embraces a masturbating student. These fantasies of blasphemy and defiance all share an antic quality that underscores their abrasive humor with despair.

Angelo (Yves Beneyton) is a sort of patrician Nazi with a cultivated superiority that passes, in the eyes of his fellow students, for power. He also possesses a well-developed cynicism which, combined with his taste for psychological violence, has a carbolic effect on the school. He stages a sardonic religious pageant for the lower-formers that serves mostly to circulate his contempt for the idea of spiritual righteousness and to scare the little kids silly. No one can escape Angelo's influence, not even the prefect, whose impacted dogmatism is the school's only alternative to Angelo--one that is equally demeaning.

Shortly after Angelo's pageant ends, In the Name of the Father comes unglued, gets at once too pat and too diffuse. Bellocchio is a director with a fondness for swift, deft irony, as his previous films (Fists in the Pocket, China Is Near) neatly attested. Here, however, political ideology gets a little unwieldy, and subtlety gives way to blatant, despairing speculations on the class system. The school's kitchen staff, made up of crippled paupers and half-wits, goes out on strike, and the students try to join them, making a gesture of halfhearted solidarity.

The strike dwindles down to pettiness, and the structure is preserved, rotten but intact: the separate classes are united only by a common gullibility and madness. Throughout the film, Bellocchio makes powerful fun of all kinds of preachiness. It seems inappropriate to find him, at the end, addressing us all from the pulpit. from the pulpit.

Jay Cocks

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