Adam

I have a different take. I don't think he crossed any boundaries with the boys of his charge. He was a man privately struggling with his sexuality and alcoholism while serving God and man.

The boy which committed suicide did so out of his own guilty feelings, and not because of anything Adam did. He confessed to Adam his troubled thoughts about giving another boy a blow job. If that troubled him so, I imagine full intercourse, which he engaged in with Blondie, may have sent him over the edge.

The character Adam had sex with was a young adult man, Lucasz, who lived locally near this parish for boys, not in it. There are several clues he is independent of the school and is an adult. First, we see him walking toward his home with his family, playing with the water hose with his brothers while immodestly dressed in his underwear, and eating dinner with his own family, not with the boys at the school, which we see eating meals together on several occasions in a school dining hall. Second, Adam was able to be alone with him in his home while taking a nap together, in a remote lake to teach him to swim, and again when buying food supplies at a local outdoor market. I don't think it would be allowed for a priest to be alone in that manner with any of his young underage charges. Finally, we see Lucasz working beside men on a construction site, and then independently leaving his home to catch a train out of town to be with Adam. I wondered early in the movie if Lucasz was an adult, and these scenes demonstrate he was.

I kind of have to agree with both of you... I do think Adam let Grovy down by not providing him with enough support, especially after he saw Grovy and Kamil engaged in intercourse, and I question why Kamil wasn't expelled from the camp. Kamil sexually exploited Grovy, who couldn't live with the shame and thus hung himself off-camera. We don't know how consensual their liaison was, it was clearly consensual in part but Grovy was very vulnerable and Kamil preyed on him. As the only person who knew about the sexual encounter between the two, and about Grovy's feelings of shame surrounding his previous homosexual encounter, Adam should have taken more steps to support Grovy and to stop Kamil from doing further harm by removing him from the situation. The indication is that Adam failed to take action because he was afraid of being outed by Kamil, who knows he's in the closet and who spray-paints "the priest is a fag" on his house and tells the other boys the same. Because Adam failed to take action, the predatory, highly antisocial and possibly psychopathic Kamil is effectively allowed call the shots, and as a result, a vulnerable boy died. I think this is a great film but I find it weird how this subplot is glided over and barely explored.

I didn't find Adam's relationship with Lukasz too untoward as nothing sexual happened between them until Adam had moved on, and only then it was because Lukasz came to find him. However, given the power imbalance, age difference and most especially Lukasz's vulnerability, it could definitely be interpreted as grooming. I like that the director didn't shy away from this and left it to viewers to judge. Lukasz entering the seminary so that he and Adam can stay close is a deliberate statement by the director - in the interview on the DVD, she talks about how they weren't sure how to end the film until the actor playing Lukasz found a story in the newspaper about a young man who had joined the seminary in order to stay with his older priest lover. They thus chose that ending as they thought it would be realistic, and because the director wanted to comment on how the Catholic Church acts as a massive closet in Poland. It's about time somebody did. Lukasz has no reason to stay at home in his village, but it is far from ideal that the only way he can live as a gay man and stay with his partner (who can definitely be seen as having groomed him) is by joining the church. The director also suggests that Lukasz is mildly autistic (Asperger's).

This isn't a simple story of "poor gays oppressed by the church", like many a Western director would make, it's far more open, nuanced and realistic, without any moralising - and it's all the better for that.