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.