In the Name of (2013) – A film by Małgorzata Szumowska – Andrzej Chyra, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Maria Maj, Maja Ostaszewska, Lukasz Simlat, Tomasz Schuchardt (Download the movie) Bayram Cigerli Blog All Big Info Archve

Adam is a Catholic priest who discovered his calling as a servant of God at the relatively late age of 21. He now lives in a village in rural Poland where he works with teenagers with behavioral problems who fight and yell abuse. He declines the advances of a young blonde named Ewa, saying he is already spoken for. However, celibacy is not the only reason for his rejection. Adam knows that he desires men and that his embrace of the priesthood has been a flight from his own sexuality. When he meets Lukasz, the strange and taciturn son of a simple rural family, Adam's self-imposed abstinence becomes a heavy burden.

Source: filmmovement.com

"Magnetic! It's a film to be admired." — Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily

"This is emphatically not a typical melodrama... and thank god for that!" — Kevin Langson, The Edge San Francisco

"An understated, sensitive film!" — David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle

"You won't forget Chyra's remarkable face, his eyes seemingly lit from within by the tortured melancholy of a medieval saint." — Anthony Quinn, Independent

In the Name of / W imię... (2013)

A film by Małgorzata Szumowska

Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska
Written by Michal Englert and Małgorzata Szumowska

Starring
Andrzej Chyra..........Priest Adam
Mateusz Kosciukiewicz..........Lukasz
Maria Maj..........Lukasz's mother
Maja Ostaszewska..........Ewa
Lukasz Simlat..........Teacher Michal Raczewski, Ewa's husband
Tomasz Schuchardt.........."Blondi"

Director of photography: Michal Englert
Production designer: Marek Zawierucha
Costumes: Katarzyna Lewinska, Julia Jarza-Bratiniec
Editor: Jacek Drosio
Music: Paweł Mykietyn, Adam Walicki

Producer: Agnieszka Kurzydlo
Co-producers: Beata Ryczkowska, Malgoska Szumowska, Peter Garde

Production companies: Polish Film Institute, Canal+, Mental Disorder 4, Zentropa International Poland

Country: Poland
Language: Polish
Running time: 96 minutes

Release date: 8 February 2013 (Berlin), 12 September 2013 (Poland)

✻

Awards

Berlin International Film Festival, 2013
Reader Jury of the "Siegessäule": Małgorzata Szumowska (Winner)
Teddy – Best Feature Film: Małgorzata Szumowska (Winner)
Golden Berlin Bear: Małgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

Camerimage Festival, 2013 (Polish Films Competition)
Golden Frog: Małgorzata Szumowska, director & Michal Englert, cinematographer (Nominee)

Chicago International Film Festival, 2013
Audience Choice Award: Małgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

Chéries-Chéris, 2013 (International LGBT film festival, Paris)
Jury Prize: Małgorzata Szumowska (Winner)
Grand Prize: Małgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

Ghent International Film Festival, 2013 (Belgium)
Grand Prix: Małgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

Milan International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 2013
Grand Jury Award – Best Film: Malgorzata Szumowska (Winner)

Kiev Molodist International Film Festival, 2013
Sunny Rabbit Prize: Malgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

Polish Film Festival, 2013
Best Actor: Andrzej Chyra (Winner)
Best Director: Małgorzata Szumowska (Winner)
Silver Lion: Małgorzata Szumowska (Winner)
Golden Lion: Małgorzata Szumowska (Nominee)

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Subtitles: English, Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Swedish, Hungarian

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Toward the end of the potent In the Name of by Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska (Elles, 33 Scenes From Life), about a country priest's desperate efforts to repress the love that dare not speak its name, a glorious procession snakes through an empty meadow. All the residents of a nearby isolated provincial community participate, many holding icons in their hands or tall embroidered banners aloft, the pageantry proudly announcing the devout Catholicism that is their passion. Accompanied by what sounds like mellow English folk music, the lengthy sequence is more a holy entr’acte than a chunk of in-progress narrative.

In the middle of the throng is outspoken Father Adam (Andrzej Chyra, above), a handsome, athletic man's man approaching middle age, who bears the piece de resistance, a splendid gold sculpture with spokes radiating from the center and a cross at the peak. Among the others is long-haired townie Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, now the director’s husband), more physically expressive than verbal, a slightly feral lad with the beatific face of a young Christ. In more than one scene, he lies with his arms outstretched in a cruciate pose, and, in a reversal, Adam washes his bloody feet following a fight with other boys, just as Christ had done to each of the apostles the night before the crucifixion. Lukasz, aka Humpty, is himself deeply troubled, discovering in pyromania cathartic therapy.

The primary conflict in this Teddy Award-winning film is the burgeoning emotional and sexual tension between the two opposites in a milieu so nasty and bigoted that fag and Jew are right down there with cunt as slurs of choice. The plot hinges on whether or not Adam will be able to channel at least some of his adoration for Jesus into physical love for a flesh-and-blood simulacrum.

The languorous communal march is a welcome relief. Up to that point, the controlled but jerky camera of d.p. Michal Englert (Szumowska's former spouse and co-screenwriter of the film), when not coolly engaged in graceful traveling and impressive overhead shots, captures rambunctious, bullying delinquent teenaged boys who live together in a social rehab center run by the affable but domineering cleric, and who earn their keep smashing enormous rocks in the grueling summer sun; locals in this impoverished milieu either engaged in backbreaking labor or altogether disengaged; and a pair of miserable, enervated affiliates of the small, underattended church that the priest has successfully overseen since his reassignment from what most would consider a more desirable diocese in Warsaw – a move to "this shithole" that the wife, Eve (Maja Ostaszewska), of priest's assistant/second teacher Michal (Lukasz Simlat) assumes is "punishment". The saintly procession puts the brakes on much of the vulgar negative energy and sets the stage for a relatively gentle build-up to a potentially hopeful future away from all this dysfunction and a cleverly surprising resolution.

The names Adam and Eve are, of course, deliberate, and this Eve does try to tempt, actually shock, Adam into breaking his vow of celibacy. ("I'm taken", he tells her impishly, relieved to have a plausible excuse for rejecting the half-naked aggressor.) After all, Michal, who wears regret like a mask, had given up seminary for her. That's a macguffin, really. Desire for men, particularly younger ones, is Adam's, well, apple. A dalliance with an altar boy is rumored to have precipitated his transfer. Now he tries to sublimate it with endless jogging, booze, cold baths, and wild dancing to American pop in his living room. (In one amusing but slightly heavy-handed scene, he does a duet with a framed portrait of the pope.)

Keeping his urges under wraps is difficult enough, especially surrounded all day by shirtless teens, but the goading of new, shameless, and barely closeted "inmate" Adrian (Tomasz Schuchardt), who is on to him, and a blossoming bond with Lukasz – the only young fellow in town who shows any evidence of a moral compass – compel him to so overcompensate that he begins to unconsciously reveal himself. The point of no return is an irrational insistence on the removal of an old couch on which he had caught a glimpse of butch Adrian banging a skinny boy after lights out. In the words of Szumowska, "A priest who is only a human being suddenly becomes a victim of his own faith".

In a Sunday sermon, Adam confesses to the few congregants that he did not find religion until the age of 21, when he wanted "to be rid of the selfish I". As good a priest and social worker as he has proven himself to be, and as divorced from the material world as one can be in this century, he has failed to feed the increasingly demanding amorous and sexual needs of his ego. Even if In the Name of contains a host of clichés about coming out and engaging in same-sex relationships, and even if the late Antonia Bird's well-received Linus Roache-starrer Priest dealt with related dilemmas back in 1994, Adam is less in pursuit of the carnal than something dogma can not fully snuff: reciprocated unconditional love.

Source: Howard Feinstein, October 28, 2013 (filmmakermagazine.com)

Scandalous exposés about gay priests hiding beneath the starchy, ossified Catholic robes make hardly news anymore, ever since the public has started pulling out hypocrisies from the Vatican's strictly-guarded closet in recent times. Cinema, on the other hand, has been slow in the uptake, where the ongoing contradiction between faith and sexuality is seldom explored, with Antonia Bird's Priest and Alex Gibney's explosive documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God being two of the most obvious paradigms. Not to mention these two works bookended the best part of the last decade. Poland, being one of the most staunchly Catholic countries in Europe, if not the entire world, takes a stab in providing perspective on the controversial subject with In The Name Of. The film already bagged an award in the Berlinale earlier this year, and is set to annoy even more stone-cold gargoyles and rigid puritans that run the Vatican and its religious empire.

Director Malgoska Szumowska's approach is neither provoking scandal nor providing scathing religious commentary but rather attempting to psychologically examine the sexual repression of a man who happen to be a priest. In The Name Of is mostly remarkable due to its bravery in separating the (wrongly) preconceived notions between homosexuality and paedophilia in the Catholic church. The protagonist Adam (played to brimming intensity by Andrizej Chyra) is a booze-drinking, marathon-running, football-kicking small-town priest whose faith and fidelity to his religion is put to test when he's tasked to run a delinquent centre, looking after rowdy young men, who no sooner than later invoked angsty sexual yearnings from the middle-aged man. Particularly the Jesus Christ look-a-like Lukasz, the reticent, bearded young lad, who take Father Adam as a counsellor and guide. The metaphor is obviously laid out – Szumowska sets up a pietá-like scene where Father Adam wipes the bloodied Lukasz as he rests on his lap during the aftermath of a boys' brawl. Szumowska's restraint is credible, never letting her piece capsize into exploitation even when sexual tensions intensify. The film is also admirable in its non-judgemental study of a man's spiritual deterioration and subsequent sexual awakening – one standout scene sees Adam, drunken and desperately lonely, exclaims to her sister over Skype, that he isn't a paedophile but rather a "faggot". In society's eyes, however, a priest hankering over young men is labelled the other way around, or worse both.

It is a shame, then, that the director's dignified essay is somewhat weighed down by its often unnecessary aestheticism. The cinematography, while nonetheless beautiful, often dips into that afterglow romantic movie palette that feels like a betrayal of the social-realist grit of this dusty provincial Poland. That cornfield sequence where Adam and Lukasz play hide-and-seek, howling like primeval apes, is laughable rather than poignant. And whenever the film segues into melancholia, we're drip-fed by this generically mawkish string music that could've been lifted out from a royalty-free online songbook best used for Grand Emotional Scenes. Ultimately, there's the narrative – strong when it focusses on Adam and his inner existential conflict, but meandering when it introduces the romantic subplot, with Lukasz's character being the main victim. His chemistry with Adam never really gels, and slightly frustrating when the narrative never really presents him as a whole character but rather as an object to which Szumowska directs Adam's desire.

Source: Janz Anton-Iago, September 24, 2013 (themoviejerk.co.uk)

Gay priests hardly raise an eyebrow anymore in Western films, but it is rare that their sexual angst is portrayed as sensitively as in Poland's Berlin competition entry In the Name Of..., which hovers in an interesting middle ground between Gothic expressionism and psychological drama, heightened by a fine cast and outstanding performances. It should put respected young writer-director Małgorzata Szumowska's (33 Scenes From Life) career back on track after her critically unpopular Elles, which essayed a radical female take on prostitution. The new film's tolerance, propped up by a careful distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia, is unlikely to arouse much controversy among the kind of art house audiences the Memento title will attract, though it could provoke protest from traditional Catholic groups.

Father Adam (played by Szumowska regular Andrzej Chyra) is the stern-faced pastor of a small parish in the Polish boondocks. Since being transferred there, he has opened a center for difficult boys coming from a reformatory, and his success in taming their foul language and manners has been "remarkable" even in the eyes of his bishop.

He works elbow to elbow with his even sterner lay assistant Michal, and there is no question about their earning the boys' respect: they command it. The wildness of the place is described in a tense opening scene showing how small children mercilessly torment a simple-minded youth. An atmosphere of danger and violence holds the whole film in thrall, and against this backdrop Father Adam's personal drama emerges.

His first temptation comes, appropriately enough, from an attractive woman named Eve (Maja Ostaszewska), Michal's dissatisfied wife, who attempts to seduce him without success. His witty reply ("I'm already taken") seems to refer to his vow of celibacy, but gradually it becomes clear that he's attracted not to women, but to the youths around him. One in particular strikes a chord, the strange, silent Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, the prize-winning young actor from Matka Teresa and All That I Love) whose long hair and beard give him the look of a teenage Jesus. In an eerie primeval scene in a vast cornfield, the priest and the boy play hide-and-seek, calling to each other with ape-like howls. Rather than give in to his sexual longings, however, Adam returns to his old vice of drinking, which culminates in the film's sole comic scene as he dances, dead drunk, to a pumped-up rock track, with a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI for a partner. Though there are not really that many ways such a tale could end, the screenplay keeps all options open until it settles on a dignified finale with a small-scale surprise.

Chyra never stumbles in his tough but engaging portrait of a sincerely devout priest with human failings, establishing a close bond with the viewer from the first scenes. The proximity of the sacred and the profane in his ministry make him at once a magnetic authority figure with a real vocation and a fragile fellow much in need of a hug.

Along with the enigmatic Kosciukiewicz, Tomasz Schuchardt's devilish "Blondie" stands out of the rowdy pack of young men testing their limits, filmed in uncomfortable close-up by a restlessly swishing camera. Cinematographer Michal Englert's out-of-doors lighting is arresting in its depiction of a forest of trees taller than any cathedral; it's not surprising Father Adam calls his morning jog "praying".

Source: Deborah Young, February 8, 2013 (hollywoodreporter.com)

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