THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND (74)

Directed by: Fred Schepisi (1976)

Starring: Simon Burke, Arthur Dignam, Nick Tate, Thomas Keneally

The Pitch: Sexual and other tensions at a Catholic seminary in early-50s Australia.

Theo Sez: One of those films that work pretty well in themselves, but immeasurably better in the context of their genres : thus, LORENZO'S OIL soars above the other terminally-ill-kid movies, COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER is the one to watch for a tale of female empowerment that avoids victimisation and keeps the oppressive husband three-dimensional - and this is the perfect riposte to those vitriol-laden whinges (most recently LIAM, for all its other virtues) that reduce Catholic education to sadistic priests vs. guilt-ridden boys. Not that it's pro-Catholic exactly - indeed, its main flaw is perhaps that it only works if you share its assumptions, viz. that celibacy is absurd and "the body will not be denied" - but nothing I know matches its subtle, generous dynamic, or the sense of truthfulness on the possible workings of a Catholic seminary (no surprise that it's autobiographical), the priests "puzzled and deeply disappointed by their own physicality," to quote Pauline Kael, while "the pubescent boys gaze with thunderstruck eyes at the eruptions of their bodies" - all of them united by the lost cause they're fighting, whether conscious or unconscious of its futility. It's like a functional yet insane family, its members united by a common madness (what "The Mosquito Coast" tried and failed to be in its film version), shown with clear-eyed affection - the priests genuinely want the best for their pupils yet can only initiate them into the same perverse system that's left them racked with doubt and self-loathing (one Brother likes to test - or torture - himself, putting on civvies and picking up girls only to retreat on the very brink of sex ; another berates a boy for being naked in the locker-room, even though he was naked behind a closed door which the priest himself deliberately opened in order to berate him). Schepisi's diffident, scrupulously sensitive, slightly anorexic style is for once perfect - any hint of criticism would've felt like injustice (these men recognise their spiritual doubt and plough on anyway, which is why they're heroic as well as ludicrous), but he merely observes, adding only a tranquil sense of Nature, lakes and forest glades providing relief from the turmoil of passions (while incidentally linking with the theme of natural and unnatural). It's a quiet film that speaks volumes, humbling in its decency, fair-mindedness and common sense ; it makes those bitter memoirs and anti-clerical screeds seem ignorant, and a little tawdry.