Page - 29 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

Religion and Communication Spaces | 29www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 23–30 certain movements (the man pulls up his shorts, does up his belt, the woman begins to expose a breast, raises her skirt) leaving the viewer in no doubt about the pow- erful sexual charge conveyed by this exchange. as someone pointed out during an oral presentation of the present analysis, the early part of the film is reminiscent of a James Bond movie. The content of the scene and the way it is filmed (the setting, the lighting which sets off the bodies, the view of the sea looking into the sun and dynamic cutting back and forth between close-ups) both contribute to impressing on us a reference to the cinematic space. all this changes when the young woman and the viewer discover that the hand- some young man is a priest. from then on, the Catholic religious space is explicitly brought into play. We see the man putting on his clerical collar and the crestfallen look of the woman. What follows confirms that the action has moved into this space: the priest approaches the young woman, brushes his hand over the Coke can as if it were holy oil and anoints her forehead, making the sign of the cross. Then he walks off and we see the young woman, her face transfigured with joy. The slogan appears: “Coke light: have a great break.” The moral of this short fable can be summarised in two points: drinking Coke Light is better than sex; Coke is a sacrament that makes you calm and really happy. A viewer belonging to the Catholic religious space will probably see this film as quite simply scandalous.10 it steals a sacred gesture for the purposes of an advertis- ing campaign. It takes this process much further than the previous film, which set the Buddhist religious space at a distance, treating it as a cinematic space. But in the sec- ond film, this is not the case: the religious gesture is made by a man who is no longer the good-looking Bond-style male who walked out of the sea, but a priest, who dem- onstrates his status with his clerical collar and the gestures he makes. We are clearly no longer in the same communication space. Would the film work outside the Catholic space? We should start by pointing out that for a viewer to get the point he or she needs to be able to recognise a priest by his garb (which is probably not a major problem even for someone far removed from the Catholic space) and to be familiar with the ritual of anointing, which is perhaps more problematic. any viewer would nevertheless grasp that this is a reference to the religious space. someone belonging to a religious space other than Catholicism would most likely be deeply shocked as well by a religious gesture being hijacked for commercial ends. how then would convinced atheists react? They might enter into the communica- tion game started by the film, but this is by no means certain. There is nothing critical about the way in which the film takes religion onboard. Quite the contrary. The nar- rative uses it to talk up the merits of Coke Light. So rejection of this implicit apologia 10 In Belgium, a consumer group lodged a complaint about this film with the Jury d’Ethique Publicitaire in february 2005, but the case was dismissed.