Through a lens darkly.

Canadian directors have been making a splash in London lately with films such as Kissed, The Hanging Garden, Lilies and The Sweet Hereafter.

Despite their critical success, however, Brits are asking why films made in Canada are so dark, disturbing and down-right weird.

"I hadn't realised until now that necrophilia could be so, er, tastefully done," a British-born film reviewer said after sitting through a screening of Kissed at the London Film Festival last November. "I wouldn't have thought it was possible to make such a thing understandable. Really, I expected it to be, well, revolting. But it wasn't and everyone seemed to like it."

In case you don't know, Kissed is the story of a young woman so fascinated with death that she becomes a mortician and begins having affairs with male corpses. "Beautifully composed and shot, with a performance of great sensitivity by Molly Parker, the film is at once macabre, sensuous and deeply moving," one poster boasted.

In a similar vein is The Hanging Garden, the story of a Nova Scotia family so dysfunctional that the hero--an asthmatic homosexual who returns home to attend the wedding of his foul-mouthed sister to his former lover--is the only `normal' character in the film. Talk about All in the Family! The hero's father is a brutal alcoholic; his mother is an uptight housewife who always wears purple; his grandmother is a cartoon Catholic who goes bonkers when her plaster statue of the Virgin Mary is smashed and his little sister Violet is, it turns out, his daughter from ... oh, never mind.

Lilies is the story of a bishop who goes to a Quebec jail to hear the confession of an inmate, is taken prisoner by a gang of inmates--all of whom are gay--and forced to confront his past by watching several homosexual tableaux put on for his benefit, including a kinky recreation of the death of St. Sebastian. Predictably, the bishop had a homosexual relationship years earlier with the very prisoner whose confession he is supposed to hear. Through it all (and for reasons known only to the director and perhaps the criminally insane), inmates prance and flounce across the screen in gauzy dresses and picture hats.

The point? The usual anti-Catholic rant, of course, directed at guilt-ridden lapsed Catholics and the just plain ignorant. Sacrilege aside, Lilies is not only preposterous, but it's the silliest film I've ever seen.

"Wasn't that great?" a gay Canadian giggled to his friend outside. "Talk about God save the Queen!"

The Sweet Hereafter is more difficult to assess, though just as disturbing. The simple story of a tragic school bus crash that rips the heart out of an obscure Canadian town, Atom Egoyan's award-winning film stars Ian Holm and Sarah Polley. Holm plays a desperate lawyer bent on persuading the town's grieving parents to file a class action suit against the bus company; Polley plays the lone, crippled survivor.

"It's really a parable about lost children, something I think is a widespread cultural phenomenon in the last half of our century," Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter, intoned piously. "We are a secularised world where we can't blame Satan, we can't blame God so we blame some guy on an assembly line at a car plant who left a bolt out. What drives people into court in lawsuits is a profound, deep anxiety caused by the fact that we haven't been able to substitute a system of cause and effect that replaces the lost religious systems that allowed us to explain the inexplicable to ourselves for thousands of years."

Close, Russell, but no cigar.

Sure, the film is allegorical, well acted and riveting, but it's treacherous too. Why? Tucked in amongst all the high-minded rhetoric and Pied Piper metaphors are scenes of father-daughter incest that are gratuitous and romantically portrayed.

What's going on here?

Since the 1960s, film directors have been socialising the world to accept forbidden practices through "sensitive treatment." This means using first-rate actors, interesting camera angles and documentary style to "open" minds, and question conventional mores on verboten topics. First to get the "treatment" was adultery, then abortion and homosexuality, and more recently, euthanasia. Now it's necrophilia, paedophilia and incest.

Slowly, through sympathetic, glamorised treatment, viewers are encouraged to "understand" the problem. Controversy ensues, the "problem" becomes an "issue," tolerance is encouraged, those still opposed are branded as prejudiced, phobic bigots, and the "problem" is eventually transformed into a choice, a lifestyle and, finally, a right.

This process is not new, of course.

Where Canadian film directors have an international edge, however, is their particular penchant for attacking Catholicism as ridiculous, backward, repressive, and stupid while simultaneously softening and seducing viewers into accepting previously unacceptable practices.

Why the vicious propaganda directed exclusively against the Catholic Church? Because it alone troubles consciences and therefore must be ridiculed, decried and silenced by those it challenges.

In this, as in the advancement of deviance through controversy and soft entertainment, Canadian film directors have been singularly effective. And they have the awards to prove it too.

Hitler would be impressed.

Paula Adamick is the publisher of Canada Post and lives in London, England. Her column appears in every other issue.