Sundays It’s a wonderfully ambiguous film. How lucky.
Long live the cinema, die the parody.
Alauda Ruiz of Azúa makes us smart. It reveals to us. It places everything in our gaze. In short, at least the responsibility of reading the world. It was always like this.
The film, which, as you already know, is about a minor who studies in a religious school and says that she wants to become a cloistered nun to the stupor or indifference of her distraught family, is very playful, very alive, and allows itself to be completed by our traumas and desires, by our belief system.
Is this sirloin dish delicious or is salivating over it an act of sadism?
What do I know, it will depend on whether or not we are vegan.
I eat meat and I also attend to the blasts of the spirit: let’s talk.
How taut the subtlety of Sundays and what height it gives to the debate. Activate some of my pleasure points. Practicing Catholics say it is a devout piece (this, of course, is because of the shameful cruelty with which fiction has accustomed them to cultural mockery: celebrate any respectful treatment for infrequent).
Atheists say it’s a horror movie.
I am neither one thing nor the other. Atheist by no means, but not religious in the orthodox or institutional sense either, so I contemplate the beauty of the cathedrals and make love and I wake up unamuniana and write between two waters, like Paco.
Maybe that’s why I see the film the way I see it. Understanding of her own and other people’s feelings and interested in the mystery that lives behind things, but critical of the official Church, its elitist aura and its permanent accusing finger, a bastion of anti-intellectualism and the dogma that impoverishes us.
Catechesis in Spain never ends.
When and how do I distinguish that Ruiz de Azúa questions religion and its tentacles?
Venga, from spoilers.
1. The language trap
During the almost two hours of footage, I seriously doubt whether God has telephoned the girl. In other words: I value the possibility. What does anyone know?
But something happens when the girl loses her grandmother, that is, her second mother (she had already lost her first and was already an orphan for all intents and purposes, after the deafness of a lackadaisical father who only thinks about his new girlfriend). He mourns his dead on the kneeler. Seek comfort. And experience an epiphany.
There is despair in the girl’s eyes (We will also have to see why God likes to appear so much when you are desperate and not when you are hopeful).
Desperation is an impulse, a springboard.
You don’t know if the girl is seeing or is fighting to see and she draws God’s scratches on her heart like someone screaming in a corrala yard. What should we expect? We know almost nothing about the invisible. Only that it exists.
Then the girl speaks. Appeal. Send your words of love to the Lord. It declares itself so beautifully and radically, with so much personality. It’s the first time we hear her really speak in the entire movie: the first time he expresses himself fluently. It’s about time, damn.
She wants to be looked at by him. She wants to be loved by Jesus now that almost everyone has abandoned her. She is alone, floating in uncertainty. Dream of a handhold. She needs God or she will be alone forever because the world is not enough. For whom is the world enough, really? I don’t know.
I listen to her speak and it moves me. The girl takes the reins of her speech and that clears my mind, it makes me believe. I see her autonomous. She thinks and feels for herself.
A human being is his words. In the words of a human being there is freedom. One is only oneself if one creates one’s own talk: the only possible photo of our brain, of our heart.
You know you are not domesticated because you choose your vocabulary and order it to exist from the mouth out. That is why in dictatorships there are prohibited concepts. Forbidden phrases. The government of the language is the government of women and men.
I think about all this as I listen to her speak, and voilaI feel relieved, I detect freedom in this girl. The girl is not captured, I tell myself, the discernment and passion are hers and genuine and not copied from the voice of the spiritual advisor or the prior.
But then the girl finishes the speech… and starts it from scratch, identical, word for word! He repeats it in block. It’s a litany! They are learned words: tired, abused. Instilled words. Words of others. Sectarian words, zombies.
Here I understand everything with dread. The girl has been abducted. He is not even free to choose the words with which to convulse with love. Nothing is his anymore, not even the words with which he gives himself. He has lost his individuality. She is gregarious. He is a victim.
She looks at the crucifix and says, very eloquently, helpless as she is, weak and without firm roots: “You are my father, you are my father.” I understand. After the officer’s failure, God is his adoptive father. God does not move. God will not go away. Not him.
I think about what he said Goethe. It is more powerful to feel loved than to feel strong. The human being, of course, is a brilliant creation. If he does not have love, he will conceive it.
Frame from Sundays.
2. The subtle Inquisition
In the same vein as the study of language perversion, I listen carefully to how the spiritual advisor and the prior speak to the girl. They gained his trust behind the backs of his family, his guardians.
How clearly we understand that it is intolerable for an adult to touch the private parts of a minor, But how many doubts arise about the intimate relationship of that adult with the child or adolescent if the influence is verbal. The protagonist had been talking secretly with these members of the Church since she was twelve years old. Did they help her? Did they drive it? Did they love her? Did they recruit her?
We only have two conversations in the film to hold onto to reach the truth. And both are governed by questions. Neither the advisor nor the prior directly tell the girl what she has to do or what she has to believe, but they take her underground to a place.
Oh, I think. How many questions, one after another, what powerful curiosity these people have, man. The questions, somewhat tricky but ambiguous, sweetly corner the girl. They accompany her subtly, without pushing her.
They’re both really smart. Great interviewers! Much to learn from them!
What inquisitors, I say to myself. The Inquisition, I think later. I smile and the tiny pieces fit together.
The religious men and the girl do not have real conversations. They lead an interrogation. She answers.
3. “I will pray for you”: forgiveness or pride?
Another moment (another detail) in which the film made me take a stand.
It is disheartening to think about the coldness of breeding. The girl doesn’t do anything for anyone. She doesn’t care about anyone but herself: her aunt, her little sisters, her grandmother, her friend, the boy in the choir are worried about her. The father makes it clear (who is also not there to talk) when he says: “The world does not revolve around you.”
The girl is lost in thought. He can’t look around. She is blind. It’s a giant wound. He gains in disaffection as the footage progresses, he polishes his selfishness. She is incapable of tenderness. He talks so much about love and it turns out he doesn’t know how to practice it.. Daughter, wake up.
Film frame.
Cloistered nun, ruminate. I wonder if a God who separates us from others is good. I wonder if it is desirable to have a God who isolates us, who makes us feel chosen (part of an elite, of the called) and makes us deaf to the pain of others.
Why would God want us for himself? Why wouldn’t God want us to multiply our love, to make the lives of others better? How much better a missionary nun. That’s where I start to get serious.
At the end of the film, the girl is already a sociopath. The aunt, who has tried to be respectful of her process and who has poured herself into her love (it is she, after all, who carries her, picks her up, supports her and takes care of her), is mistreated. She is marginalized. It is ignored. It is ignored.
She becomes frustrated and explodes, broken with pain. And the girl sees her cry and not a muscle in her face moves. “I will pray for you,” he tells her. And he leaves. What does this girl know about mercy? Have you understood something?
Frame from Sundays.
There are Catholic friends who find in this final image anger versus forgiveness, rage versus peace. I don’t agree: they have gone too literal. The girl is haughty and feels morally superior.
What God is it that elevates it above the rest of the creatures of creation?
The girl handles the aplomb of dogma. The unity of the Old Regime. It is said to be unquestionable. “That’s how I feel and that’s how it is.” There is nothing to debate here, there is nothing more to talk about.
I suspect that people like institutional religion so much for the same reason they like dogs (more than humans): because you don’t have to stop and negotiate anything. Thought and criticism are out of place. There is a vocation for submission.
Only, in religious matters, the people are the dog and the God of the Church is the master.