El cielo elegido / The Chosen Heaven

Juan Minujín and Osmar Núñez in a scene from El cielo elegido.

An unconvincing act of contrition
By Julio Nakamurakare / Herald staff
FILM REVIEW
The clash between divine intention and humankind's need for self-repression to control more carnal and earthly urges is a timeless, recurring and always fascinating theme. Temptation is, perhaps, the word that best defines the struggle between devotion and sin, between good and evil, and the permanent tension between these forces is what gives this type of tragic confrontation a sacramental fascination.
In Víctor González feature-length directorial début El cielo elegido (The Chosen Heaven) the balance seems at first to be tipped on the side of religious conviction, but there would be no story if faith were not put to the test by material concerns and ambition, and back to the all-pervasive fear of the gods.

Starring Juan Minujín as Pablo, a young priest bearing the weight of guilt over his incapacity to avoid the carnage of a horrendous, murderous prisoners' revolt, El cielo elegido purportedly takes a vow to leave no stone unturned in its unflinching exposé of humankind's weaknesses and the ensuing moral torture inflicted on sinners.
In keeping with this assumption, the poster and tagline for El cielo elegido were most cleverly designed and written, with blood dropping down the contorted face of Pablo towering over a sententious tagline which, however unoriginal, loses none of its perennial appeal: “The road to faith is not easy. Neither is murder.”
El cielo elegido, sadly enough, fails to live up to the notion, and the clash between good and evil, not to mention the flic-priest equation, gets lost in a miasma of over-elaborate tapestry portraying the twists and turns in the beliefs and actions of the film's four leads: Pablo, the good-intentioned young priest in search of redemption; father Claudio (Osvaldo Bonet), a wheelchair-bound elderly priest full of apparent scorn for the Church's sinful practitioners; father Orbe (Osmar Núñez), a middle-aged man of the frock with a murky past and a no less ominous present; and Ceci (Jimena Anganuzzi), a beautiful girl in her twenties who feigns innocence and candour but has an agenda of her own.
If circumventing sinful desire and temptation is an arduous, demanding task, then avoiding the pitfalls of genre conventions must have been equally challenging for Víctor González in his double role as screenwriter-director. González had to make a difficult choice when materializing the traumatic experience undergone by father Pablo, the harrowing circumstances that challenge his faith and endurance capacity.
His choice was not felicitous: El cielo elegido's opens with a sloppy reconstruction of the real-life Sierra Chica jailhouse inmates' uprising of 1996. A blood-drenched ordeal led by a gang that came to be known as “The Twelve Apostles” (the rebellion took place during Easter Week), the eight-day-long “motín” was ludicrous and macabre, going down in history as the most brutal prisoners' revolt in Argentine history: 1,500 inmates up in arms, seventeen hostages (including a judge and her assistant), seven dead prisoners, dead bodies ripped and burnt in the facilities, even cannibalism.
In El cielo elegido this is the nightmare that haunts father Pablo, the tragedy he mentally and spiritually tries to disentangle himself from. But this one-liner is a brief conclusion viewers must draw from the film's epigrammatic beginning, for there is no smooth connection and no link with father Pablo's second harrowing experience as a man torn between faith and the uncontestable evidence that Hell is indeed an uncontrollable force on Earth.
Now leading a more peaceful life at a theological seminary, father Pablo is once against caught between good and evil as embodied by the rambunctious father Claudio and the scheming father Orbe. The two men, father Pablo later discovers, share an ominous past that binds them together, an obscure story that, once discovered and brought to light, threatens their privileged positions in the Church and in civilian life.
In more expert hands than screenwriter-director González's, this would have made perfect material for a neo-noir (shall we make that Euro-noir?) story of deception and the ensuing, unflinching search for the truth carried out by a flic, in this case replaced by a priest turned sleuth. But good intentions do not always suffice, and this is evidently the case with El cielo elegido's twisted, confusing narrative, plot and subplots. The sense of looming danger and mystery about to be unveiled is slow coming, and the resolution is, to say the least, loose, if not completely at odds with the film's stated premise.
As father Pablo, the fresh-faced actor Juan Minujín is not quite able to convey the anguish of a tortured soul, and thus the psychological thriller aspect of El cielo elegido is left at the mercy of a disorienting storyline. Father Claudio, full or mordant remarks about the Church's dogmatic, uncontestable truths, is one of the main assets in El cielo elegido. Apparently filled with nothing but contempt and scorn for faith and religion, the role of father Claudio, as played by the gifted stage and screen veteran Osvaldo Bonet, is a side dish that unexpectedly becomes an appetizing main course. Osmar Núñez's father Orbe bears many similarities with his Head Disciplinarian role in Diego Lerman's La mirada invisible (2010). Father Orbe, like Head Disciplinarian Biasutto, is full of conceit and possesses a disquieting capacity to lure the innocent into bringing out their evil side. Ceci, the young girl also in search of redemption, plays a duplicity game not unlike the damsels in distress in hard boiled narratives. However, as played by the accomplished actress Jimena Anganuzzi, the role of Ceci makes a bumpy transition from inoffensive to scheming instigator. Nobody's fault but the wayward, unclear script, inarticulate and sorely lacking in cohesion.
PRODUCTION NOTES
El cielo elegido (The Chosen Heaven). Argentina, 2010. Written by: Huili Raffo and Víctor González. Directed by: Víctor González. With: Juan Minujín, Osmar Núñez, Osvaldo Bonet, Jimena Anganuzzi. Cinematography by: Rodrigo Pulpeiro. Music by: José I. del Fabbro. Running time: 123 minutes.