The Crime of Father Amaro: Oh Father...

Mexico's hottest young sex symbol is playing a fallen priest, and the Catholic Church is up in arms. But audiences are crossing picket lines to see it. Jan McGirk reports on an unholy row

A new wave of irreverent Mexican movies keeps thundering forward, pounding against the country's remaining taboos and stereotypes. The world premier of director Carlos Carrera's controversial film, The Crime of Father Amaro, broke all domestic box office records here last weekend when audiences flocked to watch the slim-hipped star, Gael Garcia Bernal – last seen playing with himself in Y Tu Mama Tambien – struggle with his celibacy vows.

Provincial bishops have urged a boycott. "Freedom of expression," two complained in a statement, "does not authorise the denigration of... institutinos." Clergymen have told their parishioners that seeing the film would be a sin (in Leon, the hometown of the devout Catholic president, Vicente Fox, two cinemas switched their shows to horror flicks: Satanic, but somehow considered less offensive). Meanwhile, Carlos Abascal, the labour minister from the conservative National Action Party, denounced the film as a "full frontal attack on the church". And a Catholic anti-abortion group filed a lawsuit against the federal government for helping fund the film.

All this outrage, however, has sparked a run on tickets that required Columbia Pictures to book a hundred extra cinema halls. Even the book on which the movie was based became an overnight best seller in Mexico, and publishers have hastily arranged a second print run of the original 1875 Portuguese satire by Eca de Queiroz. The Crime of Father Amaro may prove just as polemical today as the Martin Scorcese hit, The Last Temptation of Christ did in the late Eighties. The child abuse scandals that have rocked North American parishes since January make the clergy's chastity violations on film all the more resonant.

The screenplay, by Vicente Leñero, sets the priest's clandestine sex in a modern Mexico where drug dealers launder money through church donations, guerrillas gain the sympathy of a cleric in the remote sierra, and the church hierarchy flexes its flaccid muscles. Mix in witchcraft, abortion, betrayal and abuse and cinemagoers in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country will queue up around the block and even cross picket lines. Scraps of yellow and white vatican banners still line the route where last month millions of Mexicans glimpsed Pope John Paul II trundle by. Now these streets are overlooked by a doleful Bernal in a clerical collar, his eyes downcast from giant hoardings. A yellow sticker warns that scenes on screen can be highly perturbing. "Lead us not into temptation..." reads the fine print. Fans have been bombarding Bernal with e-mails, and at least 30 every day demand a session of cyber-confession with the fallen priest.

Daniel Birman Ripstein, one of the film's producers, is astounded by the sell-out crowds in 400 cinemas across Mexico. "We really didn't expect so many viewers in the first week," he admitted. "My grandfather wanted to film this project 30 years ago, and when we started looking for funding seven years back, many people told us the story was too old-fashioned," he said. "The movie is not about religion. This is a love story between human beings inside the church. The controversy only draws people into the cinemas. To keep them there, the film must work on its own terms."

There were nervous titters from the audience at the premier when, early on, a tone-deaf baglady snatches a wad of pesos from the offering plate in the village church. But scenes that toy with Mexico's most sacrosanct icons, such as when a disheveled witch feeds a purloined communion wafer to her sickly cat, drew audible gasps. When the puckish priest, fresh from the seminary, drapes a starry cloak meant for the Virgin of Guadalupe over his 16-year-old lover, not a single tamarind chile sweet was unwrapped, not a soda was slurped, and people stopped chewing their popcorn. The sight of the bishop disrobing for his bath and revealing droopy flesh made viewers wriggle in their seats with revulsion, while organ music swelled, suggesting a latter-day sequel to The Exorcist. But the Mexicans hooted with recognition at a narco-traffickers' christening party. Gun-toting heavies in leather jeans guarded the mansion where the smiles were as tight as the alibis.

"My principal themes are holiness and hypocrisy," said the director, Carrera, still a bit hoarse after celebrating the film's launch and his 40th birthday on the same weekend. "Gael is a fine actor and he carried it off." The young actor, whose fame in Mexico came from early roles in soap operas, was cast two years ago, when he was finishing the offbeat dogfighting film, Amores Perros. Since then, he's become an international sex symbol. His feral smile and soulful hazel eyes have drawn comparisons to a Latin James Dean. In a smouldering new Levis ad, Bernal shows off low-rise jeans for men. Now he's rehearsing in Argentina for his next role, playing Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

The 23-year-old actor was clearly unhappy about the clergy's reaction. "We Mexicans are more intelligent than they [the bishops] think," he argues. "We have the power to decide for ourselves, and they don't understand that the movie is fiction cinema. They are criticising a work that they haven't even seen." Dulce Maria Martin, a schoolteacher, after seeing the feature on Saturday night, dismissed the church controversy as so much bluster: "I'll bet 90 per cent of us Mexicans have made love beneath a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It's not such a big deal. It's reality. The bishops should open their eyes."

In one memorable scene, the young priest attempts to control his lust through mortification of the flesh and keeps his hand over a gas burner. It makes a departure from the standard cold shower, but doesn't do the trick. He beds a pious teenage beauty, Amelia, arranges further rendezvous through the confessional screen, but panics when she falls pregnant. His ambitions to rise in the church hierarchy clouds his judgment. It all ends in tears.

The film's future seems far more assured. It will show at the San Sebastian International Film festival, and a UK release is planned for later this year. For which, presumably, we should all thank God.