Priest (film)
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| Priest | |
|---|---|
 DVD cover |
|
| Directed by | Antonia Bird |
| Produced by | George Faber Josephine Ward |
| Written by | Jimmy McGovern |
| Starring | Linus Roache Tom Wilkinson Robert Carlyle |
| Music by | Andy Roberts |
| Cinematography | Fred Tammes |
| Editing by | Susan Spivey |
| Distributed by | Miramax Films |
| Release date(s) | September 12, 1994 |
| Running time | 98 mins USA 105 min UK |
| Country |  United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Priest is a 1994 British film, made in Liverpool, which was first shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is a drama directed by Antonia Bird and starring Linus Roache.
[edit] Plot
Father Greg Pilkington (Roache) is a Roman Catholic priest struggling between his calling as a priest in an inner-city parish, his personal traditional conservatism and his homosexuality, while dealing with the sanctity of the confession in regard to knowledge that he obtained in confession about a local father who is sexually abusing his own daughter.
Five stories overlap.
- Fr. Greg's clash with the liberalism of his parish priest.
- Fr. Greg's problems as someone from a comfortable middle class background in working in a poor working class area.
- The clash between Fr. Greg's traditionalism and his homosexuality.
- The contrast between Fr. Greg's unhappiness at the heterosexual sex life of his parish priest with his own struggle with his own homosexual desire.
- The revelation in confession that Mr. Unsworth, a parishioner, is sexually abusing his daughter, with the priest caught between a desire to reveal the abuse and his obligation to uphold the mandatory confidentiality of information supplied in confession.
When the mother walks in on her husband, molesting her daughter, she and other parishioners are furious that the priest did not break the Church policy. The priest however argues that he could not reveal confidential information supplied in confession. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert argues this is factually inaccurate, and that as the husband was not asking for forgiveness nor sorry for his crime, the priest had every right to notify the authorities [1]. However, it is equally possible that Fr. Greg is protecting the sanctity of the abused girl's earlier confession, not that of her father. Fr. Greg tries to engineer situations where the father's actions could be discovered, such as sending the mother, his housekeeper, home unexpectedly in the hope that she would catch her husband. However when Fr. Greg is arrested for having sex with his boyfriend in a parked car, the parishioners reserve themselves while some defend the Church policy against homosexuality. Fr. Greg is supported by a heterosexual priest that defends him in front of the Church ("Do you really think God gives a damn what men do with their dicks?") and this promotes a brief verbal shouting match about what the Bible says about homosexuality. At the end of the film, when parishioners boycott Fr. Greg when he gives out the Eucharist, queuing instead to receive communion from the other priest, one person breaks the boycott; the young woman who had been sexually abused.
