Antonio Capuano | Pianese Nunio, 14 anni a Maggio (Sacred Silence) / 1996

dirty heroes: body and soul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Antonio Capuano (screenwriter and director) Pianese Nunio, 14 anni a Maggio (Sacred Silence) / 1996

 

The local Naples priest, Don Lorenzo Borrelli (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), titled the blue jeans priest, is akin to the heroes of many a movie, including those represented in Matteo Garrone’s Gommorah and in the character of Father Pete Barry in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). Both characters Barry and Borrelli along with director Garrone are fighting war, so to speak, against the local mafia or in the Naples more particularly the Camorra, who controls Naples and is prevalent in Borrelli’s poor neighborhood. And Borrelli knows that he cannot save the young children he attempts to nurture as long as the parents accept the mafia and engage with them as a daily part of their lives.

      Yet like Father Barry, he speaks out, endangering his own life and sometimes even those of his parishioners, trying to convince families that accepting and participating with the Camorra will leave them all in the chaotic conditions in which they and their neighbors have been living for decades. Borrelli is what we might describe as a hero-priest, someone with high ideals living them out in real before the rollercoaster of a shabby world in which both live.

     Yet Borrelli has a serious flaw: he has uncovered a beautiful young 13-year-old, a talented singer who also plays the organ for his church, and himself wishes to become a priest, with whom he has he now spends his meals, his intellectual tutelage and, rather shockingly, his “personal affection.” In short, this hero-priest is also pedophile, trapped between his ideals and his body.

    The boy himself later admits that he was not averse to his priest’s “affections,” and knows that there is no one in his crazed society—his father, dressed in a blond wig, goes about the city with a cart selling eggs and other foodstuffs, while his mother is basically a whore, the boy’s own brother later proudly admitting he is now a Camorra member—and he truly loves Father Borrelli.

     The local mobsters, tired of the harangues against them and, for all their seeming strength, necessarily seeing the revealment of the priest’s secret life as their way to shut him up, begin their pressure on the young acolyte.

     In a perhaps overlong series of events and a great many verbal attacks against his social enemy, the Camorra, the movie makes it way surely to where we all know it must end.

     Director Capuano does not forgive his tragic hero for his awful sins of the flesh, but does reveal him in the final scenes as a kind of Christ, who refuses even a funereal in the church for one of the Camorra leaders who has just been killed.

     This is a swirling world of murder, injustice, and hate, in which there are no pure “heroes.” Borrelli, himself, has justified his pedophile behavior with a notion that “eroticism and sanctity” are the same thing.

      By film’s end, disgusted as we may be by his sexual behavior, the viewers themselves must ponder the same question.

      Increasingly, through local attacks (the film begins after an attack on Borrelli, where youths have stolen his watch and beaten him), the young Nunio is pressured by his father, brother, and others, as well as a team of a male and female policemen, visiting his school where they pretend to be social workers. Nunio is manipulated to become a kind of traitor, desiring freedom from Borrelli’s sexual bonds—he is, it appears actually a heterosexual—knowing at the same moment that there is no one else in this terrible stack of rubble who has cared more for him and given him his own identity.

     By the time of his last visit to Borrelli, the priest even permits the young boy to betray him to the police with the words, “If you report me, I’ll say nothing against you.”

      The boy does so, almost unwillingly, yet tired, as he puts it, of being a “sheep.” And the result is the silencing of one of the few social forces attempting to stand up to the Camorra.

      We recognize that even Nunio’s life will end disastrously, as in one professional gig he ends up with another boy singing in the subways.

      This movie could not probably me made or taken seriously today when instead of pondering such issues we simply dismiss them as immoral, but in 1996, Matt Blake writing in The Wild Eye, described it as “an amazingly courageous film, considering the fact that it’s essentially about a paedophile and, what’s more, a paedophile who is in many other ways so upstanding and heroic. Lorenzo certainly makes for a difficult protagonist, at the same part admirable and despicable; and the fact is that he takes advantage of a vulnerable young man in much the same way as the Camorra he so despises. But he’s a genuinely tragic protagonist, someone who tries to do good but fails because of fatal character flaw which not only undermines his cause but also his whole moral bearing.”

      This is the kind of film that one carries with one for months after seeing it, a work gnawing at the heart and mind. There is no easy answer for dirty heroes. 

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).