The Catholic Church in Chile: Pablo Larraín's masterfully cringe-inducing THE CLUB opens

Here's a film that makes our current Catholic-scandal movie, Spotlight, look practically benign. THE CLUB, the new film from Chilean director/co-writer Pablo Larraín tackles priestly pedophilia in the kind of manner we have not seen previously: utterly raw, angry, take-no-prisoners. Unspooling in a small Chilean seacoast town in a home in which are housed several priests with, shall we say, bad reputations, along with a "nun" (maybe former nun) who takes care of them, from the outset the movie alerts us to the fact this little group has managed to do very well for itself. In fact, the film works quite nicely as a microcosm of The Catholic Church itself -- with all of its power and rewards, hypocrisy and denial offered up in full bloom.

The Club may be the most anti-Catholic movie I have ever seen, and yet its characters also seem very human and real (if pretty bizarre). What they do here, however, is shockingly awful, and the fact that it all works out for the "best" makes it seem even more so. Senor Larrain, shown at left, has given us a tale of Catholic guilt and non-retribution that stands with the best (or is it the worst?) of them. Although we come to understand to some extent the half dozen men, along with the woman who keeps them, as individuals, it is finally the group -- that Club of the title -- that we know best.

This is rather like the Church itself, don't you think? Where all is accomplished to keep the "group" -- the power -- together and going strong, no matter the "sacrifices" that must be made along the way. Here, as with all organized religion, the end justifies the means. Interlopers of any kind (there are three major ones in this movie) must be destroyed or co-opted. Maybe both simultaneously.

How all this is demonstrated by Larraín and his co-writers (Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos) involves everything from small-minded townspeople to greyhound racing, black-market babies to sexual child abuse (performed, of course, in the name of Jesus), military torture to simple blackmail. And all this is woven into the fabric of life experienced by our little beachfront club members.

The movie opens with a bout of that dog racing and then the introduction of a new "priest" into the current group, followed almost immediately by the introduction of the classic "victim" figure, a fellow named Sandokan (a fine Roberto Farías, above), who makes this figure one of the strongest and most original yet seen in the many films about priest pedophilia so far served up.

Then we have another newcomer to the group: an investigator sent from the Vatican to assess the group and decide what to do with them, since pushing defrocked priests off into far-away places and then forgetting about them has now come back to haunt the Church. How our investigator plies his trade and how he, too, is finally used and co-opted proves one of the films darkly comic highlights.

Watching these people play off of and bounce around each other makes for some of the more unsettling, unnerving scenes experienced in cinema over the past few years. Larraín is increasingly masterful at the kind of indirection that shows us how we are all perpetrators and victims. Does this let us off the hook? Hardly. Instead the filmmaker does here for the The Catholic Church what he has done earlier in his films regarding the Pinochet regime in Chile.

The performances are all as bizarre as the subject matter would indicate, and they work individually and together to make the movie as creepily memorable as it ought to be. Organized evil never dies. Particularly when it comes from organized religion.

The Club, from Music Box Films and running a mere 97 minutes, opens this Friday in New York City (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Landmark Sunshine Cinema), and on Friday, February 12 in Los Angeles (at Landmark's NuArt) and in Southern Florida at the O Cinema Miami Beach, the Tower Theater Miami and the Silverspot in Naples, and then on February 19 here in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters. Click here -- and then click on THEATERS -- to see all currently scheduled playdates across the country.

See Brent Leung's HOUSE OF NUMBERS; ignore the fundamentalist backlash

When HOUSE OF NUMBERS -- Brent Leung's excellent documentary about AIDS and HIV -- opened for a week's run last year, it was savaged in a particu-
larly nasty review in The New York Times.  When, last September, Trust
Movies read that review, he immedi-
ately concluded that the film was not worth his time.  Big mistake.  He should have read between the lines.  Because Mr. Leung (shown below) questions the "received wisdom" and the medical/political establishment party-line on AIDS and HIV, the Times reviewer (as well as another in the British medical journal Lancet only this month), suggests that Mr. Leung will next turn his attention to questioning the existence of gravity.

To begin with, any scientist (or even a well-informed layman) who imagines that the law of gravity and what is known about AIDS are remotely comparable in quality or quantity should turn in his degree or give up his day job (and perhaps become a Times reviewer!).  Both reviews also claim that House of Numbers is a forum for AIDS "denialists."  I do not think so.  The documentary never denies the existence of AIDS or HIV. But it questions -- and question hard -- various held-as-gospel concepts about HIV and AIDS.

What is the diagnosis for having AIDS, and what symptoms does this diagnosis include?  Don't ask.  Or if you do, be sure to note what country you're visiting at the time. (Funny that neither of the above nasty reviews tackle this question -- or cogently address any of Leung's primary points.) Diagnoses have changed so over time and over country that this becomes one of Leung's major problems with how AIDS and HIV are perceived.  AIDS testing is another.  The filmmaker goes to South Africa, takes an AIDS test from a sweet young woman who should probably not be giving the test, or at least should be offering better information, and while in that ex-Apartheid place, looks into the major poverty there and wonders, as do many South Africans, some of whom we hear from (see below), that perhaps there is some mixing-up going on between AIDS diagnoses and immune systems racked by malnutrition and disease.

Leung does not insist that one condition equals the other -- something that both the Lancet and Times reviews above say he does; the Lancet review also says that House of Numbers claims that there is no connection between HIV and AIDS. It does not.  Instead it offers up the possibility of co-factors -- a damaged immune system due to poverty or drug use (doctor-prescribed or recreational). Yet neither review mentions the co-factor theory (which has been around for some time now.)

Approaching 70, TrustMovies predates the AIDS epidemic.  He saw it happen here in New York City and has seen numerous friends, acquain-
tances, sexual encounters and one full-time lover fall to the disease.  He's followed the ins-and-out of the official story and has from time to time questioned it -- as have many others who some-
times have had problems accepting what the medical establishment and drug companies are telling us.  This does not make us AIDS denialists, but we do believe that there is much more to the story that is being told. And we wonder, as does Mr. Leung and some of his interviewees (one of  which is shown above), why so little funding is given over to any theories other than those of the toe-the-line establishment?  Instead, money and research goes to prop up what seems like a faulty-from-the-start theory, full of holes, and to the drug companies, which keep pumping out a lifetime of drug therapies to those infected.

However, TrustMovies is no scientist.  So he asked an acquaintance and occasional web reviewer who is a science writer for some corroboration. Anthony Liversidge, above, founder and managing editor of Science Guardian, was happy to give it  Liversidge has also been following the AIDS/HIV story for decades and says that House of Numbers get its facts right and is, in his opinion, a trustworthy documentary.  (In fact, Liversidge covered the film
long before I did.)

I have now seen the documentary twice -- and could easily sit through it another time or two, so dense is it with information and statistics, not to mention interviews with a number of establishment and anti-establishment figures, all of whom answer Leung's questions and often dig themselves deeper and deeper into the muck. (Little wonder a number of these people are up in arms about the film; it does not make them look good.)  Leung paces his film well, and threads along his main story the smaller stories of several individuals worth hearing.  There are man-in-the-street interviews, as well those with the big boys (and girls).  It all adds up to 90 thought-provoking minutes.

My biggest question after viewing House of Numbers is why there is such an enormous backlash against it.  Were it as "wrong" as its opponents claim, they could easily contest it on a point by point basis; instead they simply keep trying to stop it wholesale -- as though it has no right to be seen and heard.  I have spoken with director Leung several times now and learned that, at screenings, groups and individuals are often lined up shouting against the movie.  Journalists originally disposed favorably toward the film post-viewing, suddenly come out against it after "a good talking to." This strikes me as censorship, which has no place in real science -- although throughout history, it is always present.

House of Numbers hints at a conspiracy between medical establishment and drug companies.  God knows there has been enough conflict-of-interest scandals in that department over the years -- from doctors hawking cigarettes in ads and TV commercials way-back-when to the more recent examples.  Celia Farber did some fine investigative reporting for Harpers some time back on the subject of AIDS drugs, and more recently in New York magazine, David France reports on what the AIDS cocktail concoction is doing to AIDS sufferers now.  AIDS drugs have always been dangerous:  AZT was toxic-unto-death; the latest batch remains toxic enough to noticeably shorten the life span and productivity of its users.

Regarding the possibility of mistaking (deliberately or otherwise) African (South and otherwise) poverty symptoms for AIDS -- as Leung and others continue to suggest --  this seems quite a legiti-
mate question.  So far as the gay community and a suppressed immune system are concerned, this connection has been on our minds since AIDS made its nasty debut in the early 1980s. Its appearance came at a time when many gay men were doing drugs that we now know suppress the immune system.  But rather than owning up and then investigating this at the time, the connection was played down so that gays' "lifestyle" could not be blamed for acquiring AIDS.  Yes, of course, there was and is enough homopho-
bia out there already, so one can understand gay leaders' reluct-
ance to admit to possible lifestyle consequences.   But, hello -- what if?  Suppressing the truth eventually comes back to bite you in the ass; by now it's little wonder so many gay posteriors are a bit raw.

From the very start AIDS research smacked of trouble.  American claims to have discovered the HIV virus were almost immediately countered by those in France (that's Luc Montagnier, above).  While the prize eventually went to both scientists/countries, suspicions were never really put to rest.  Since then so many questions have arisen regarding the virus and the disease -- its source, diagnosis, even the very existence of the virus, that -- instead of truly answering questions and looking further for missing information, the establishment instead decided to stonewall, and has continued this stance ever since -- calling the questioners everything from crazy to murderous because "denialism kills" (that's the Lancet).  I think it's time to call out the real denialists: doctors, researchers, drug companies and politicians who are unable and/or unwilling to allow dissent and questioning -- and the shrieking banshees at screenings who want to keep this film from being seen and discussed.  These are the kind of tactics indulged in by our former political administration, are they not?  Power closing rank and discrediting all disagreement.  I'm not even saying that House of Numbers is right about everything.  But it absolutely needs to be seen and argued about.  It's not the best documentary of the year by a long shot -- but it may be the most important.  

Your next chance to see the film begins this Friday, January 22, when it be screened in Portland, Oregon, at the Regal Fox Tower Stadium Ten.  Take that chance, if you're in the area. Check the film's web site for further screenings, and look for a DVD to be released later in the year.