Priest.

Paradoxical is both the making and the matter of Priest, written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Antonia Bird.

Almost every shot in this British movie shows us what must be seen at that particular moment of the story and puts us precisely in the right spot from which to view the action. And every sequence of shots has been assembled by editor Susan Spivey with a disdain for wasted motion that is downright athletic. Jimmy McGovern's dialogue is by turns pungent and poignant and always well-served by a cast dedicated to unfussy verism.

But - paradox one - though the filmmaking is precise, the storytelling is diffuse.. In fact, there are three stories in this movie, and the best one is nearly buried by the others.

A young priest, Greg Pilkington, takes up his new post in a Liverpool working-class neighborhood and soon clashes with his fellow cleric, Father Thomas. Both men are compassionate and devoted to their parishioners, but Pilkington is a traditionalist who preaches in the pulpit of the need for rigorous self-scrutiny, while Thomas, apparently an exponent of liberation theology, roams the aisles during his sermons about forgiveness and social justice. Pilkington's disapproval of Thomas is both intensified and complicated by his discovery that his fellow priest is sleeping with the housekeeper. I was mentally rubbing my hands in anticipation of seeing just how the script was going to work out this clash of temperaments and morals when something curious happened. Plot two commenced. The traditionalist turns out to be homosexual.

From then on, the Pilkington-Thomas conflict is set aside. Thomas, with his easygoing and easily satisfied sensuality, becomes the voice of reason and compassion, indeed the very pattern of normality, as he counsels and defends the younger cleric, whose homosexuality brings him scandal and torment. Father Thomas wins over the movie, so to speak, without having to win us over to his moral position, and actor Tom Wilkinson's charm and assured masculinity clinch the victory. Father Pilkington's real fight is not with Thomas but against his own sexual nature, a dramatically problematic struggle since it doesn't advance towards a climax but instead seesaws. He yields to desire, repents, yields, repents, yields .... But not to worry. Soon, plot number three is underway, and this turns out to be the most interesting element in the movie.

In the confessional, a girl of fourteen tells Pilkington that she has been forced by her father into incest. Naturally, the priest tries to get the girl to turn to her mother or teachers for help, but the child, her spirit stifled, refuses. How is the priest going to save the girl without violating sacramental secrecy? And a larger question is broached: How can this secrecy be good when it allows evil to thrive? Comparisons to Hitchcock's I Confess will be made, but that fairly powerful film was somewhat compromised by conventional plot developments. By contrast, McGovern and director Bird cut to the core of the situation and give us something truly piteous and disturbing. This strand of Priest is riveting and, if extricated from the rest of the movie, would be one of the best half-hours ever committed to film.

But the very fact that a part of it could be extracted and remain coherent shows what is wrong with Priest. Even if Pilkington's sexual problems didn't exist, his torment over the child's abuse certainly would. Father Greg isn't in a quandary because he is both gay and manacled to a terrible secret, but because he's a priest and bound by the church's rules. In regard to the girl's suffering, the homosexual problem is beside the point. Would a heterosexual priest's conscience be less exercised? But it's the sign of a truly successful drama that nothing is beside the point McGovern and Bird are like talented short-story writers trying to create a novel by jamming separate tales together.

But there's still another problem with this movie. And another paradox.

The filmmakers' compassion for Pilkington is, beyond question, sincere. But their incredulity at the rigors of his calling is also evident. Those who take those rigors seriously are shown to be incapable of happiness and/or goodness. Consider: there are five priests in this story. One is sleeping with a man and hates himself for it; another is sleeping with a woman and as gotten over hating himself for it; a third, elderly, has been calibate all his life and therefore feels that his life has been wasted; another is a provincial Savanarola, full of self-righteously expressed bile; presiding over all is a bishop who is nothing but a smarny bureaucrat. This lugubrious roll call ay have been assembled by McGovern solely in order to show what the hero is up against, but its effect is to stack the dramatic deck. Though the conclusion of Priest leaves its hero till taking his vows of celibacy seriously, still struggling to keep them, it's hard to miss the implication that this poor guy should relax, take a lover, get on with his social work, and be ore like Father Thomas. His struggles with his conscience only make him look like a wimpy neurotic. That's the other paradox of Priest. Its creators want us to mire their hero, but their contempt for his calling coaxes the audience into feeling, if not contempt, a rather lofty pity for him. Whether or not McGovern and Bird have an agenda to promote with this movie, they are, at the very least, pretty smug secular humanists.

But talented secular humanists, very talented. The dingy coziness of a rectory is captured perfectly, as are the squalid yet oddly neighborly streets of Liverpool. With `what witty economy Bird portrays the flutter that the good looks of the newly arrived Pilkington cause among die rectory's cleaning staff. How deftly she summarizes the hellishness of the abused child's family by simply panning from the father's gloating face to the despairing visage of his daughter and bringing the camera to rest on the smiling, pathetically unknowing mother.

Bird is masterly in conveying two very different sorts of terror. Pilkington, after his first sexual tryst, speeds away on his bicycle. A gay youth (not the lover), also on a bike, happens to pull alongside the priest and keeps pace with him for a moment. Because Bird keeps the camera above the boy's waist as Pilkington looks at him, the youth seems to be flying rather than cycling, as if he were a sprite of pleasure and temptation that the tormented priest cannot shake off.

Terror more stark is in the scene in which the child abuser steps into Pilkington's confessional to warn the priest off his trail. The grillwork of the stall's window makes a pattern on this pervert's face that seems to both fragment the visage and to bloat it as if it were an image in a kaleidoscope. This rapist may once have acted upon compulsion but has now become an amateur philosopher of sin, boasting of his offense to the priest and outlining a rationale that is as absurd and monstrous as he is. In this scene, Bird's imagery and McGovern's language fuse to create a quick sketch of evil that I won't ever forget.

The homosexual lovemaking in this movie is as explicitly staged as the heterosexual intercourse in most other R-rated films, no more but no less and certainly enough to disgust some people. I found the candor both nonpornographic and absolutely necessary to dramatize the war between spirit and flesh. To comprehend the intense pleasure Pilkington takes with his lover is to understand the pain its illicitness gives him. But don't say I didn't warn you.