A simply fantastic adaptation of Queiroz’s novel.

By Helen Lima de Sousa

As I sat down to watch the Mexican director Carlos Carrera’s 2002 adaptation of the nineteenth century novel O Crimen do Padre Amaro by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz, I had high expectations. As a book lover, in the past I have tended to avoid film adaptations of my favourite novels. The visual representation of characters and scenery, which I develop with my own imagination as I become further engrossed in a novel, does not always allow me to readily accept someone else’s interpretation. The simple fact that different people can interpret the same novel in different ways, creating different images in their mind’s eye of the characters and places in the novel, means that quite often the way in which a director chooses to visually represent the novel clashes with what I had created in my own mind.

This time, however, things were different. Not only did Carrera’s film receive nominations for Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, but in 2008 I saw the Brazilian director Daniel Filho’s 2007 adaptation of another of Queiroz’s novels, O Primo Basílio, and I was impressed. What worked so well with Filho’s adaptation was the decision to gather the essence of the novel’s storyline and transport it into the twentieth century. The result was a fresh, modern film laced with Queiroz’s witty irony. As Carrera’s El Crimen del Padre Amaro was set in the year 2002 in the Mexican town of Los Reyes – very different, therefore, from the late-nineteenth century setting in the Portuguese town of Leiria in Queiroz’s original novel – I had high hopes that it would achieve the same. Was I let down? Were my expectations too high? In a word: no.

El Crimen del Padre Amaro is a simply fantastic adaptation of Queiroz’s novel. Not only that, it is also an excellent film in its own right. With Gael García Bernal (from Y Tu Mamá También and Amores Perros) as the young father Amaro, the plot follows the forbidden love between the newly ordained priest and the young Amelia, a teenager whose devotion to the Catholic Church causes irreconcilable differences between her and her journalist boyfriend Rubén. It could be said that Queiroz’s determination to reveal the Catholic Church as corrupt facilitated the makers of the 2002 film in their adaptation of a nineteenth century novel into a twenty-first century film. Corruption in the Catholic Church is, by no means, a dated issue. However, what cannot be denied is that with the inclusion of drug lords and guerrillas into this web of corruption the result is a truly contemporary, Latin American film. At the same time, while the presence of drug lords and guerrillas is not subtle, neither is it overplayed, freeing the film from any sort of clichéd representation of Latin American society.

The success of the film is credit to both Queiroz’s literary handling of timeless issues and Carlos Carrera’s creative, modern-day twists. Many scenes in the film are reminiscent of the novel, with the dinner between the Church leaders, where food and drink is flowing freely, working well in both. The one marked difference in this scene is that whereas in the novel they discuss female promiscuity, in the film the issues in question are the drug-lord Chato Aguilar and father Natálio’s connections with the guerrillas. Other similarities, such as Amelia’s mother’s affair with Canon Dias, and Amaro’s and Amelia’s exploitation of a local man and his disabled daughter in their quest to continue the affair in secret, work just as well in the film as they did in the novel.

The film featured in the 2nd Portuguese Film Festival in London in 2011, which focused on film adaptations of Portuguese literature, and is truly deserving of the Golden Globe and Academy Awards that it has picked up. So, my final verdict? A definite must-see.