Themes of guilt and redemption run through the work of Martin Scorsese. His latest movie, about Jesuit missionaries in medieval China, focuses on the testing of faith

Growing up in New York’s Little Italy, Martin Scorsese conceived two life-shaping obsessions. One was the Mass; the other was the movies. Being taken to St Patrick’s Old Cathedral and sneaking into local movie theatres were both a holy experience – just different dramas. “We used to joke about Mass being the same show every day,” he once recalled. The one-time altar boy contemplated the priesthood. He lasted a year as a junior seminarian before being expelled, “distracted” by falling in love with a woman.

The seminary’s loss has been the cinema’s immeasurable gain. Yet Scorsese never forsook the ties of the faith. They are plain to see in the opening credits of his breakthrough movie as a director, Mean Streets (1973), as minor mobster Charlie (Harvey Keitel) awkwardly poses for the camera, shaking the hand of his priest on the church steps. Immediately below the frame flash up the words “Directed by Martin Scorsese”. It’s a film almost bent double by the weight of Catholic guilt.
Violence and redemption have been the key components of Scorsese’s vision ever since, and form the axis of his intense new film Silence. Based on the novel by Shusaku Endo, it recounts the story of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 1640s to trace their mentor, an older priest who has allegedly apostatised. Christianity was then outlawed in Japan, and the film’s opening shot of martyrs crucified and tortured with boiling water sets the tone of what is to follow.