Priest in holy disorder

The novel on which Carlos Carrera's film is based was written in another time (1865) and another place (Portugal). The fact that its story of corrupted priests and power politics in the Catholic Church shifts seamlessly into presentday Mexico is both notable and alarming.

Plus ça change. The Catholic League of America was, of course, incensed by the movie which is, already, Mexico's most commercially successful film ever.

When young freshly ordained priest Padre Amaro (Gael García Bernal) arrives in rural Los Reyes to take up his post under the guidance of the cunning Father Benito (Sancho Gracia), two things are clear: Amaro is being groomed for Vatican stardom, and he is going to have a problem adhering to his vow of chastity.

Enforced celibacy is, however, the least of the church's problems. Once Amaro has embarked on an affair with a wanton virgin, Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón) - the daughter of a woman who regularly services Father Benito - other layers of compromise and corruption start to unpeel.

The older priest is deeply in thrall to the realpolitik of religion. And while he launders money for the local drug baron, Chato Aguilar (Juan Ignacio Aranda), in order to finance a hospital, another priest, Father Natalio (Dami·n Alc·zar), is up in the hills practising Liberation Theology by arming peasants and guerrillas to aid them in the ongoing battle against Aguilar's machine-gun-toting killers.

Meanwhile, Amaro's compromised situation, his intelligence and his vocational ambition play him right into the hands of the Bishop (Ernesto Goméz Cruz), for whom he becomes a cat's-paw in the complex power struggles that unfold.

A young, local journalist, who is also Amaro's love rival, has a sceptical attitude to the church, fuelled by his father's rabid anti-Catholic views. He writes a story exposing both Benito's association with the drug lord and Natalio's association with the guerrillas - thereby killing two sacred birds with one stone.

His search for "truth" is coloured by his jealousy of Amaro, and Benito claims to be turning bad money into good. But while Amaro's actions are inspired by his priestly "vocation", where does vocation end and overweening ambition begin?

When Amelia falls pregnant, Amaro is really put to the test. He turns to Dionisia, a primitive religious fanatic who feeds her cat holy wafers and keeps a personal altar at home decorated with dismembered dolls. Not so much a holy fool as a holy psychopath.

Amaro's crime, it becomes clear, is not his carnality but his cover-up. In a film crowded with issues, the overarching sense of religious injustice is crystallised in a deal struck between the town's mayor and the bishop.

Church and state collaborate no longer in the specially darkened corridors of the Vatican but by a simple phone call. It is a chilling moment of casual manoeuvring that has a devastating fallout.

Bernal draws on his sexual baggage from Amores Perros and Y tu mam· también to play the most virile priest seen on screen since Richard Chamberlain starred in The Thorn Birds - though he lacks the inner torment of