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In the Name Of tells the story of Adam (Andrzej Chyra), a sexually and spiritually conflicted priest who is assigned to minister to at-risk youth in rural Poland. The story deftly avoids addressing the issue of pedophilia and the Catholic Church directly, although it is fascinated with issues of consent, power, and religion. Adam falls in love with Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), one of the at-risk youth he is charged with mentoring, and the bulk of the plot of the story deals with the psychological and emotional obstacles to their sexual union.
The film is infatuated with young, male, bodies, and as such there are lots of scenes of men in homosocial spaces, with shirtless young people drinking, doing drugs, and talking about sex while policing the bodies and desires of other men. There is something repressive and deconstructive about this kind of gender policing that the film, to its credit, addressed head on, but never tries to positively resolve. The youth and the town, we are left to imply, end the film just as homophobic as they were at the beginning of the film, and nobody seems to challenge the idea that faith should be an obstacle to love and desire. In this way, the sexual politics of the film are realistic and rather depressing.
The film, finally, is about absence, as implied by its title’s omission of “God” or “the Father.” It is a film that asks its viewers to embrace the discomfort of choosing between serving one’s faith or fulfilling one’s sexual desires, but that never allows one to think that a man of God can serve both. By presenting this binary the film asks its viewer to consider and to deconstruct the disjunction implicit in making a man choose between serving his community and satisfying his desires. It is, in this way, an uncomfortable but important film to watch.
Toronto’s Inside Out LGBT Film Festival opened with In the Name Of on May 23.
Image: Memento Films International
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