‘Pasion’ engulfs Mexico

Clutching a half-eaten bag of popcorn, Mauricio Alvarado drifted into the lobby of the Cinemex Real movie theater looking like a man who’d just had a religious experience. In fact, he had.

Alvarado had just sat through a Thursday-night advance public screening of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” or “La Pasion de Cristo,” to use its Spanish-language title. The movie was very powerful and had affected him deeply, the 30-year-old business administrator said, blinking through red-rimmed eyes and gesturing repeatedly at his heart. “He was very convincing,” Alvarado said of actor Jim Caviezel, who stars in the movie as the embattled, suffering Messiah.

A few feet away, 22-year-old medical student Sandra Zamora also was praising the film, saying she believed it didn’t blame the Jews for Jesus’ death but implicated all humanity. “The violence and the blood were justified,” she said. “It’s a way of showing what happened, although some people don’t like it.”

As Gibson’s hotly debated New Testament epic was about to open in theaters across Mexico on Friday, there were numerous signs that its phenomenal stateside success might be replicated south of the border.

Jose Juan Hernandez, managing director for 20th Century Fox Mexico, said 560 prints of the movie were being released in Mexico this weekend, meaning “La Pasion” would be showing on nearly 1,000 screens. Initially, he said, the distributor had planned to release only 300 prints.

But that number rose to 500 and finally 560 after the movie’s huge U.S. box-office showing. That’s a very large number for a serious dramatic film in Mexico. By comparison, Hernandez said, “Finding Nemo” and “Spider-Man” each opened in Mexico with about 600 prints. “La Pasion” will have opened in nine Latin American countries by this weekend and five more next week, Hernandez said.

Guillermo Ortiz, a spokesman for the Mexican Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a prepared statement that “The Passion of the Christ” would make for great family viewing in the days leading up to Holy Week and Easter Sunday.

However, that won’t be possible for all family members. In Mexico, the movie’s most controversial aspect so far has been its “C” rating, which means no one under 18 can see it, even if accompanied by an adult. (In the U.S., its R rating means a parent or guardian must accompany children under 17.) The directorship of Mexico’s ratings authority, Radio, Television y Cinematografia awarded “La Pasion” the adults-only rating due to its intense and explicit violence.

“We’re totally against this decision because it’s not fair,” Hernandez said. “They (ratings authorities) are treating us and the theaters as if we’re kids and we don’t know what decision to make.” He predicted that the rating would increase piracy of the film, which is already selling on Mexico City streets in bootleg DVD copies.

In Mexico, the movie’s skids have been greased with several weeks of mostly favorable advance coverage. The controversy in the U.S. over allegations of anti-Semitic content doesn’t appear to be dampening its prospects here.

That’s largely because Jews represent less than 1% of Mexico’s population, some religious experts here said this week. Even so, some Jewish leaders who have seen the movie found its representation of Jews to be objectionable.

“It’s excessively violent, and in my opinion it’s anti-Semitic,” said Daniel Fainstein, director general of the Universidad Hebraica in Mexico City. Fainstein said he also thought the movie misrepresented the true character of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who is depicted in the film as being troubled by Christ’s execution. “He was a cruel man,” Fainstein said.

But neither the movie’s representation of Jews, Romans or anyone else, nor its graphic depiction of Jesus’ brutal flaying and agonizing crucifixion, seems likely to turn off significant numbers of potential Mexican viewers. Last Thursday, the liberal daily newspaper Reforma ran a survey of a sample of 200 people who had seen the film before its official opening; 96% said they liked it, 98% said they would recommend it, 81% thought the level of violence was appropriate for the subject matter and 79% said the movie had bolstered their religious beliefs.

In this overwhelmingly Catholic country, “La Pasion” is receiving the kind of attention Hollywood studio heads dream of. Newspapers have run pictures of nuns attending advance screenings of the movie. The media have reported that some have been moved to tears by the spectacle of the Christian Messiah being tortured, spat on and put to death.

“We’ve been working very closely with the Catholic Church,” said Hernandez of 20th Century Fox Mexico. “They’ve been very supportive. “

In this unusual convergence of religious authority and popular culture, ads for the film have carried endorsements from Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico, who described “La Pasion” as “an authentic spiritual experience.” In another ad blurb, Jorge Serrano Limon, an anti-abortion crusader and conservative social critic, opined that “from a cinematic point of view, I consider the movie part of the heritage of humanity.”

“In Mexico, for me, there’s no controversy at all,” Hernandez said. “It’s not a film about controversy. It’s a film about love, it’s a film that doesn’t even tell you that you have to go out and kill the first Jew that you see or the first Roman that you see. It’s a story that everybody knows, and due to your Catholic faith it’s a story that you know happened.”

Dissenting voices toward the film have been hard to find in the Mexican media. One exception is Eva Saraga, a screenwriter, who was quoted in Reforma as saying the film was boring and had a lot of blood in it. “It seems to me that this is a movie that is trying to make a lot of money out of controversy,” she said.

Some intellectuals and scholars have gone on record to counter the idea that the film takes a jaundiced view of Jews. Javier Sicilia, director of the highly respected Mexican Christian periodical Ixtus, told a newspaper interviewer that, “Anti-Semitism is a modern construction. The world of Jesus wasn’t anti-Semitic.”

Meanwhile, another film dealing with the life of Jesus is finally getting its theatrical premiere here, more than 15 years after it first opened in the United States. Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” is playing at several theaters in Mexico City and elsewhere. Reportedly it has drawn in a few moviegoers who thought they would be seeing “The Passion of the Christ.”