Dir. Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2011, 105 mins, in Italian and other languages with subtitles
Cast: Michel Piccoli, Nanni Moretti
Review by Carol Allen
“Habemus Papam” is the wording of the announcement to the waiting crowds in St Peter’s Square, when a new Pope has been elected. In Moretti’s story we are party first to the election procedure inside theVatican– all rather fascinating, that – but the story really gets going, when a modest and unknown outsider Cardinal Melville (Piccoli) is elected as Il Papa. He has a panic attack just before he is about to be introduced to the crowds, says he can’t do the job and the cardinals call in a psychiatrist (Moretti) to get him back on the papal track.
It is a very good story idea, which gives the director a chance for some really great shots of the glories of theVaticanand all those cardinals at the conclave in their red robes. One is irreverently reminded of the late comedian Dave Allen’s remark about the Church hierarchy – “The higher you go, the prettier the frocks”. Later in the film, the Pope goes AWOL and takes refuge in what we have by now discovered is his first love, the theatre, and a crowd of cardinals turn up there looking for him. Again the situation produces comic echoes, this time of Monty Python’s “No-one expects the Spanish inquisition”.
From which you’ll have gathered that, as well as looking very cinematic, the film has a lovely gentle sense of humour – it’s never malicious. There are some very telling comic moments, as when during the election all the cardinals are praying “Please God, don’t let it be me”. Another great comic idea is that of the member of the Swiss Guard, who has been briefed to give appear indistinctly at the window of the Papal apartments to give the impression the Pope is in his room and who is meanwhile having a great time there enjoying the fine food, wine and other fruits of the ecclesiastical good life.
Piccoli as the bewildered Melville is as usual excellent. He has a frailty and vulnerability here which are very touching. The gradual revelation of his lifelong desire to be an actor is lovely, including the relationship he forms with a troupe of thespians, who are rehearsing Chekhov’s The Seagull. One member of the troupe is totally mad and wants to play all the parts in the play and like much of the rest of the film these sequences have more than a touch of the surreal about them.
But while there are many really good scenes which linger in the mind, the film doesn’t always hold together in a strong narrative. The role Moretti has written for himself is a bit problematic. He has a delightfully comic scene early in the film, when he is trying to make a clinical assessment of the Pope’s condition, while labouring under the handicap of the long list of topics the cardinals tell him he is not allowed to question him about. But the character is somewhat underdeveloped and doesn’t have a clear function in the plot. It would have been good for example to have had more about the conflict between faith and psychiatry, which is a theme crying out to be aired in this particular set up and one which Moretti merely touches on briefly. And there is a scene in which the psychiatrist is talking to the conclave about the various odds there were on the papal election, which raises the implication that the favourite, who didn’t want the job, has somehow rigged the ballot. But that one is ducked too. So the psychiatrist’s only function in the story ends up being to fill in time in a rather irrelevant way, when we’re not actually following what’s happening with the runaway Pope.
Structurally the film is a bit of a muddle, but it’s still worth seeing for Piccoli’s performance and for those scenes which gently touch both the heart and the funny bone.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
Which came first, the problem or the soliuton? Luckily it doesn’t matter.