The Passion of the Christ

This little map shows pretty clearly how attuned America's Latins are to the suffering side of their faith. Indeed my Brazilian friend TC described to me yesterday how she "never really found the love" in her local version of baroque Catholicism.

Due to an earlier misunderstanding fostered by an exchange of emails, I had thought that her valued assessment of this movie was "very beautiful" when in fact she hasn't even seen it and the only very beautiful thing about it is Monica Belluci. She laughed at the idea of me sitting watching it, my forehead deeply lined as I strained to discover the aesthetic majesty of mad Mel's vision of the crucifiction!

For me at least, the pathos in this story is compromised the moment I started to consider the notion that 'the Christ' was something more than an ordinary man. (There are also times when the levels of blood and gore are intense enough to transform pathos into bathos.) I also couldn't help feeling that Gibson has unwittingly emphasised how local this event was, in both historical and geographical terms, which undermines the claims of what we witness to universal significance.

V's cousin Ileana is a school teacher in Guatemala, the sort for whom the smell of sandalwood incense is like an early warning that 'Jesusito' is loitering in the vicinity, and during the course of Semana Santa in Antigua this year, she described to me how she had gathered a little group of like-minded middle-aged ladies to watch the DVD of The Passion of the Christ at home. It does intrigue me how this film seems to appeal strongly to the kind of individuals that would normally think it sinful to see a horror movie.