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The mystery of religious faith gets a ferocious and deeply contextualized workout in Abel Ferrara’s latest film, “Padre Pio,” which opens Friday. It’s an idiosyncratic not-quite bio-pic of the controversial Italian saint, a priest and a Capuchin friar who developed a cultish following in a rural village in the years following the First World War. With his tormented, mystical visions, his stigmata, and his stern clerical counsel, Pio exerts an enigmatic allure in the farm town of San Giovanni Rotondo. Yet, strangely and admirably, what appears to enthuse the filmmaker even more than the eventual saint’s peculiar manner and spiritual fervor is the political life around 1920, in that town and in all of Italy, when Pio was forging his public identity.
The film skips around from setting to setting, and from scene to scene, with a sort of sketch-like, quasi-journalistic impressionism that foregrounds Italian political conflicts from the late nineteen-tens to 1920, just before Mussolini’s rise to power. I’d estimate that Pio’s scenes fill less than half of the film’s hundred-and-four-minute run time; there’s far more observational detail and dramatic development in the sequences of local political organization and dispute, labor relations, and police repression. Ferrara, who wrote the script with Maurizio Braucci, seems to have reversed the equation that’s promised in the movie’s title. Rather than contextualizing Pio’s story by way of events in his town, it’s Pio and the soul-scourging force of ecstatic Catholicism that contextualizes the politics of Italy as exemplified in one small town.
The movie begins, soon after the armistice, with a pointed juxtaposition of Padre Pio’s journey from the rugged countryside to the monastery, and the arrival of a group of veterans returning home. There and throughout, Ferrara’s agitated handheld camerawork lends the action a sense of immediacy and of looming chaos—violent feelings on the verge of eruption. In the center of town, women and children wait in the street for transports that may bring their husbands and fathers home from combat. Some arrive intact, to emotional greetings. Some aren’t there, prompting townspeople to ask officials to scour documents for information. Others arrive gravely wounded, like one man who, embraced by his wife, declares that he’s still a man—a poignant affirmation explained by the revelation that he has lost his legs in combat.
With the restoration of a semblance of ordinariness comes the return to work. The prime employer is a haughty landowner who doesn’t hesitate to work men literally to death and conceal their demise for fear of a proletarian revolt. Many of the laborers are Socialists who take part in a strategy session with a local party leader; in anticipation of impending elections, which will be Italy’s first with universal (male) suffrage, the leader persuades them to eschew Russian-style revolutionary methods in favor of a democratic pursuit of power. But the landowner—and his foremen-cum-henchmen, themselves former laborers, and also the police—have no intention of relinquishing power. Outnumbered and out-campaigned, the coalition of the wealthy and the nationalistic calls the election rigged and acts accordingly.
Amid the brewing storm of political violence, Pio is a man apart. His apartness is embodied in the casting and in performance. The entire cast spotlights Italian actors, performing in accented English, whereas Pio is played by Shia LaBeouf, speaking in his own American voice. The incongruity passes nearly instantly—Pio’s personality and his range of experiences are so exceptional as to make his accent seem a part of his character. Even his mannerisms and gestures stand out from those of his peers; he portrays Pio’s self-afflicting ministry as if born to the role, as when, in church, he lifts a Eucharist fiercely above his head as if it were a blade that he was preparing to plunge into his gut. It’s only when he yells “Shut the fuck up!” at a parishioner whom he’s consigning to Hell (for her sexual confessions) that the distinction of his voice tears the movie’s dramatic texture, and seems momentarily laughable.
What Pio gets—what puts his religious passions in the foreground despite their relatively brief dramatization—is an inner life that gushes out in voice-over interior monologues and appalling fantasy visions that leave him raving in his cell. Politics come to the fore even in the friar’s anguished memories of the interrogations and violence that he endured as a result of his opposition to Italy’s involvement in the war. That division carries over to the town at large, where the left’s challenge to the established, quasi-feudal order is matched by its anti-militarism. The Socialists seethe at the dominant nationalists who imposed horrific sacrifices on the country, which, at the start of the conflict, was neutral.
Ferrara seems fascinated by the politics and desperation of an oppressed populace, forced into war against their will and returning home to endure old, unrelenting burdens. They make smart, principled efforts to improve their lot and Italian society at large, and yet they face a torrent of violence from the overlords that seems continuous with the war they survived. (The filmmaker also makes clear the sexual depredation that’s inseparable from the economic and political dominion of wealth and arms.) Ferrara presents Pio’s provocative identification with Jesus Christ as a private cry of rage at the miseries borne by his parishioners—an existential anguish that’s essentially political. And the director bears witness to the paradox of religious isolation, of a fervor for justice and compassion so intense that it leads to a submergence in one’s own spiritual depths.
But what appears to excite and inflame Ferrara, above all, is the immediate contact with the past. Filming in a variety of Italian locations, he observes the heavy tread of working people, the cruel strutting of the petty grandees, the furrowed brows of local elders, the vehement protests of those who find a public voice for what seems like the first time. He films the land up close; he dwells on the stones of ancient buildings and the rubble-strewn alleys between them, the dark glow of firelight, the grim weight of old-fashioned weaponry, the unchanging procedures of farm labor, the coldly forbidding walls of religious institutions. (The continuities of history lead to a clumsy needle drop: a scene of unbearable farm labor is accompanied by a cut from the blues musician Blind Willie Johnson, ahistorically likening Italy’s abuses of class to America’s abuses of race.)
In short, “Padre Pio” is a historical drama without historical distance; it feels like a wild effort to reach the immediate experience of the past and its furies. The movie reignites long-ago events by the spark of physical contact, and its age-old difficulties illuminate current turmoils and battles with an absolute rage that appears to be very much like the filmmaker’s own. Not that Ferrara offers any easy responses or practical solutions; rather, he suggests both the profound spiritual torment that afflicts those who see the world clearly and the epochal stakes and millennial struggles that converge in local conflicts. In its hectic, scattershot way, “Padre Pio” feels very much of the desperate present day. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
