BishopAccountability.org
	'Twist of Faith' A Man's Wrenching 'Twist' By Gene Seymour Newsday [United States] July 1, 2005 The level of intimacy achieved in "Twist of Faith" is so unsettling and deep that one wonders how it could have possibly been achieved. It is one thing to hear adult victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests speak out in uneasy voices on TV and radio. It is yet another, far more potent thing to be allowed into a victim's home, life and struggle to come to grips with what happened. The central figure in Kirby Dick's festering sore of a documentary is Tony Comes, a firefighter living in Toledo, Ohio, with his wife and two children. Comes is the kind of man you'd like to be when you grow up: cool, honest and devoted to his family. Yet beneath his resolute exterior, Comes is tormented by what happened to him as a teenager when he was molested by a local priest who invited kids to his lakeside home for weekend parties. Only Comes' parents and his wife knew about the incident before he decided to go public in 2002, the same year allegations of similar sexual abuse by Catholic priests surfaced nationwide. Matters became even more urgent for Comes when his abuser, who had left the priesthood but taught in a public school, moved to a house five doors away from him. Filmmaker Dick, whose previous work includes 2002's "Derrida" and 1997's "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist," helped his project by allowing the Comes family to videotape themselves. This may have been the only means through which Comes and his wife could articulate the complex effects of Tony's legal battles with the church, his own psychological struggle and its impact on his marriage. (Even their counseling sessions are taped.) The most poignant scenes, not surprisingly, involve his children; not just when he has to tell them what happened to their dad as a boy, but when he faces his own violently conflicted feelings toward his daughter's first Communion. He can't sleep, he's losing weight, still he presses on with his lawsuit against the church. Deep down, he's not expecting a totally satisfying conclusion. Neither should you.