Enough Praying (Aldo Francia, 1972) (Patreon)

It happens sometimes: the random luck of the draw directs you to a masterwork you'd never have discovered otherwise. This is the second of two feature films by Chilean director Francia, and by the looks of it, he could have gone on to have a brilliant career. Instead, Francia -- a pediatrician by trade -- left filmmaking to become an author and arts administrator in Chile, founding the Viña del Mar Film Festival. This may seem surprising when watching Enough Praying. Francia's writing and direction pretty much seethe with restlessness and frustration at a nation incapable or unwilling to help its most vulnerable citizens. But then, it's also a film about having to make hard choices, abandoning one's presumed calling in order to join the fight happening at your doorstep.

In the simplest terms, Enough Praying is the story of Father Jaime (Marcelo Romo), a priest who becomes fed up with what he perceives as the hypocrisy of church doctrine. His superior insists that Jaime's concern should be his parishioners' souls, but the younger man finds this hard to reconcile with the fact that they are sick, starving, and subject to police abuses. The tipping point is when one of the church's wealthiest donors, a shipyard owner, pays his tithe with a vague injunction to "help the needy," while using the government to break a strike. His underpaid workers are among the very people he expects the church to assist, and so (in neoliberal language) the industrialist is merely treating charity as an externality.

This could be a very ham-fisted political tale, and more than a few summaries of Enough Praying characterize it as a dramatization of the rise of Latin American "liberation theology." But there's quite a bit more going on here. For one thing, Francia is careful to show Fr. Jaime calling the church's priorities into question precisely because they contradict the teachings of the Gospels. A more accurate translation of the title, Ya no basta con rezar, would be "prayer is not enough." The film in no way rejects Christianity, but asks devout Catholics to put their money where their mouth is. (The very idea that matters of the Spirit and the Flesh are intertwined is quite foreign to the European theological tradition, so much so that Pope Francis can be dismissed as a Communist for adopting even a moderate version of such views.)

Also, Francia is a deft formalist, constantly moving between various segments of Chilean society to demonstrate their interconnections. The opening sequence, which delineates the landscape of Valparaíso through a series of tracking shots up and down the hills, from the high streets to the ghettos, very much resembles Kiro Russo's depiction of La Paz in El Gran Movimiento, so much so that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Francia was a direct influence on the younger director. If the trajectory of Fr. Jaime's radicalization, and Enough Praying more generally, can only move in one direction, the film nevertheless expresses the expansive tentacles of oppression, showing that often the middle- and upper-classes damn their fellow Christians with good intentions. Neither strident nor dispassionate, Enough Praying is its own howling animal.