THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 97
by Fredric March, slugs him back. For a
second, he teeters upright, whereupon
she puffs at him, as if blowing the clock
off a dandelion, and he keels over. That
gets his attention just fine.
T
he contenders for Best Interna-
tional Feature Film at the forth-
coming Academy Awards are a muscu-
lar crew. Four of them—“Pain and
Glory,” “Parasite,” “Honeyland,” and “Les
Misérables”—are already on the loose.
The fifth is a Polish movie, “Corpus
Christi,” which opens on February 19th.
Directed by Jan Komasa, it stars a young
actor named Bartosz Bielenia, a bundle
of intensity with a buzz cut. If Oscars
were decided according to the speed
with which voters flipped out when
they stared into the eyes of the princi-
pal character, “Corpus Christi” would
be an easy winner.
Most of the tale is set in a village in
Poland. There, the faithful are tended
by Father Tomasz (Bielenia), who hears
their confessions and strives to heal their
wounds. He also smokes and drinks
with his parishioners, dances with them,
and shows them his tattoos. (One is a
large Madonna and Child, incised on
his upper back.) His congregation, sparse
when he first arrives, begins to swell. By
the end, the pews are full.
Just one problem: Father Tomasz is
not Father anything. He’s not a priest
at all. And his name isn’t Tomasz but
Daniel. He’s a jailbird, sent to prison for
a vicious crime, and that’s where we ini-
tially meet him, as he keeps watch while
his fellow-inmates brutalize some poor
soul in the carpentry workshop. Not
long afterward, Daniel is released on
parole. Having fêted his freedom with
a bout of boozing, cocaine snorting, and
casual sex, he takes a bus to the far-flung
village, where a job in a sawmill awaits
him. One glance at the mill, though, is
enough; he walks on, goes to the house
of the local clergyman, and announces
himself as Father Tomasz. When the
elderly incumbent is taken sick, the
young pretender steps in.
The comic potential of this setup isn’t
hard to spot, and many movies have fol-
lowed the farcical path. The theory that
dressing up as a man of God is intrinsi-
cally funny was proved by Denholm El-
liott, as a butler turned doddering Irish
priest, in “Trading Places” (1983), though
later refuted by Sean Penn and Robert
De Niro, in “We’re No Angels” (1989).
The clearest predecessor of Komasa’s
film is “Le Missionnaire” (2009), a French
frolic that never came out in America.
It was all about, you guessed it, an ex-
con who lands in a secluded community
and dons a cassock as a cunning disguise.
The difference is that “Corpus Christi”
ain’t funny. There are scraps of levity, as
when Daniel, in the confessional, furtively
checks his phone for the correct sacra-
mental procedure, yet what ensues, in
that scene, is the most affecting moment
in the movie, with a female penitent re-
duced to tears by the counsel that he
provides. Notice that we don’t actually
see him give her absolution; do the film-
makers consider that a heresy too far?
Bearing in mind that Poland, where
eighty-six per cent of adults call them-
selves Catholics, is the most devout of
the larger European nations, you soon
realize that Daniel is anything but a sim-
ple fraud. In prison, he assists the chap-
lain—a tough nut, whose name really is
Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat)—duringservices, and asks whether, as a convict,
he might be accepted at a seminary. (Not
a chance.) For Daniel, the religious life
is more than a convenient front, or a ref-
uge where he can go to ground. It is, or
could have been, his natural home. The
spirit is willing, but the résumé is weak.
Komasa strews the narrative with
subplots. Daniel is drawn to a young
woman, Marta (Eliza Rycembel), but
scorned by her mournful mother, Lidia
(Aleksandra Konieczna), who is both
the housekeeper at the vicarage and the
sexton at the church. (Does she suspect
him of deceit? It’s a fine performance,
alert with moral suspense.) Also, before
Daniel’s time, there was a fatal road ac-
cident, in which six inhabitants of the
village crashed into a seventh. The whole
place has been roiled by grief, and it’s
up to the pseudo-priest to confront the
waves of anger and recrimination, and
to bid them be still.
Some of these story lines, in truth,
work better than others. Whenever the
movie strays from its hero, you feel oddly
impatient to get back to him, to watch
his cravings do battle with his conscience,
and to wonder anew what’s burning in
his blue-green gaze. On the dance floor,
he looks frankly terrifying, as if lost in a
pentecostal trance. “Corpus Christi” is
neither a parable nor an allegory, yet image
after image seems charged with intent,
from the opening shot—of carpenters’
saws, grating to and fro like instruments
of torture—to the climax, an apocalyp-
tic welter of fire and blood. This Daniel
has no need to enter a lions’ den. If I were
a lion, I’d be afraid to enter his. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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Richard Brody blogs about movies.