Special Christ in the cinema: The Passion of the Christ, by Gustavo Bernstein
Ontology of the epidermis (or the morbidity of flagellation). A disfigured face, full of bruises. A lacerated body, torn by torture, tattooed in blood by infinite lashes. More and more blood. A lot of blood. Pools of blood around him. This is the novel iconography that Gibson introduces into the cinema: a Christ with unrecognizable features, deformed by the extreme violence of punishment.
Tributary to the gore or splatter aesthetic, the film revels in the visual exploitation of martyrdom with stark obscenity. The physical ordeal is all that matters. From the first minutes to the crucifixion, Christ is a chained beast subjected to all kinds of scourging. The morbid creativity to exhibit the ways in which a man's flesh is torn is taken to the extreme of delighting in every detail, in every lacerated fragment.
This apology for physical violence is intended to cover itself with the initial epigraph: “He was pierced for our rebellions, crushed for our iniquities; by his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53). These wounds obsess the director to such an extent that the piece is limited to a merely epidermal interpretation of the Christian torture, as if the torment that the Redeemer had to suffer was rooted in the most superficial of his anatomy. The result is a Christ with his face smeared with latex contusions and his entire body carved with a bas-relief of bloody makeup.
The whirlwind of blood and bodily disfigurement that fills the two hours of the film is alleviated only in the last scene, when a completely n-ked resurrected body emerges from the tomb, whose epidermis exudes a smoothness worthy of the best cosmetological treatment. The piece thus closes in a dermatological key, as if the deep dilemma of the protagonist were limited to a matter of skin.
That the film is not interested in nurturing the viewer with Christian ideology is obvious. The value of his doctrine, his teachings or his message have no place in a purely materialistic approach. The character operates only as an excuse to develop an aesthetic centered on morbidity, on the voyeuristic enjoyment of the torment of a body. That kind of apotheosis of the mortifications in the organic humanity of Christ stands as the only support of the visual spectacle. And all the special effects are put at the service of shocking the public: from the abuse of slow motion to prolong the visual pregnancy of pain to sound shocks to emotionally amplify the moment of impact.
In order to enhance the shock, Gibson adds to the gore certain basic tics of horror cinema, such as the appearances of children who suddenly mutate into demons or the direct appearance of a Satan with an androgynous face and verb who walks around during the agony carrying arms a gloomy and misshapen baby. Not only does he lick the blood and the bodily scourges, he also seeks shock and horror through disturbing inserts. The idea is not to give the viewer respite, always falling back on continuous visual or sound resources that ceaselessly impose an immediate perceptual shudder.
The acting interpretation pays the excess. The faces tend to the exaggerated grimace of trembling, fear, mercy or impiety, depending on the character. The most outstanding and pitiful case is that of Barabbas, who appears not as a combative zealot but as a kind of somewhat oligophrenic troglodyte who, after triumphing in the election over Jesus, sticks out his tongue and mocks him as in the pantomime of a children's play. But there are more naive examples: two legionnaires charged with whipping Jesus are portrayed as if they were just a couple of idiots. Or another absurd sequence already bordering on homophobia: the display of the decadence of the court of Herod Antipas, stigmatizing him as a homosexual king surrounded by a court of transvestite buffoons. They all mock and mock Christ.
All these distortions of the historical and/or evangelical truth collide with the supposed objective of shooting the film in Aramaic to give it more verism. In principle, because it would be absurd to think that the presentation of a historical fact will be more truthful if the dialogues respect the original guttural sounds made two thousand years ago: it is a representation, and as such, truthfulness does not prevail but rather credibility, based on the consistency of each element with the aesthetic sense of the work. And the ridiculousness is accentuated because, even in the face of the superstition of a truth, its purpose collapses when listening to Christ and Pilate converse in Latin, when at most they would have done it in Greek, or when the Jewish ritual is scandalized in Aramaic, when invariably It was celebrated in Hebrew.
The inaccuracies, added to the stigmatized characters referred to, the inclusion of an androgynous demon that walks through the film, the demon-possessed children that swarm through history, the Virgin cleaning in the praetorium the puddle of blood left by torture or Manichaeism with that the Sanhedrin is treated also come face to face with the supposed fidelity both to the Gospel and to the historical chronicle. What is reliable in the film is conspicuous by its absence. From the blood and bruises to its illusory characters, everything is a mise-en-scène that doctored the sources. The entire film is a great forgery, a gimmicky artifice that overflows with an undoubted passion for bleeding.
The Passion of Christ (The Passion of the Christ, United States, 2004). Direction: Mel Gibson. Screenplay: Mel Gibson, Benedict Fitzgerald. Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel. Editing: John Wright, Steve Mirkovich. Cast: Jim Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Christo Jivkov, Monica Bellucci, Francesco De Vito, Mattia Sbragia. Duration: 127 minutes.
The text is part of the book El rosto de Cristo en el cine. A cinematographic reading of the Gospel, by Gustavo Bernstein. It can be obtained in bookstores in the city of Buenos Aires and in MercadoLibre for the interior of Argentina.
