There was a young priest who stalked the pornographic night of the X-rated movie houses and the prostituting streets outside them in what had become a sexual compulsion. Sometimes he felt that he had lost all control of himself and with that loss his very soul. But his soul was saved through the confession of his sins and their forgiveness by a fellow priest who was not his own publicly acknowledged confessor but a fellow sinner, an older priest who had had a twenty-year quasi-marriage and who would in turn ask the young priest for absolution after confessing to him. When the young priest made confession to his acknowledged confessor and spiritual guide a little later, he had only to confess to the evil thoughts of the days since he last stalked the streets, thereby keeping his spiritual guide in the dark. He behaves as if in a dream when he is in the grip of this compulsion, as if he himself has become a character in the dirty movie he is watching, and in this state of disassociation picks up the first prostitute he sees, and, with release, becomes guilt-ridden and disgraced until he must seek out his secret-confessor. He will find a telephone within minutes of the event, plug in the number, wait, and say in a voice thick with mixed emotions of shame and anger, "I must see you." His secret confessor never refuses, no priest does, but he will take the confession with a heavy heart, for his friend and for himself. The confession, it seems, has become part of the compulsion, as both have come to suspect. Advice is traded, elements of which might have proven helpful to either priest, but none has been acted on, until ... the young priest, Father Michael Din, wanders into a lower East Side bar and meets Toddy Muir, a young woman as lost as he, and follows her into an underworld of drugs and violence, becomes involved in murder, and is stalked by the murderer. With his own life at stake, and the lives of others in the balance, he is tested to the limit.
If you are looking for the usual, Scenario for Scorsese is not for you.
