The Holy Week is a time of mystery and wonder: the Passion, Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ are tangibly re-presented to the faithful during three sacred days, the Triduum Sacrum. Holy Thursday commemorates Christ’s last Seder with his friends; this Jewish central act of remembrance became His gift of the Mass. Good Friday is His death on the cross, the most ignominious form of capital punishment in Roman times – and Easter Sunday celebrates the Lord’s Resurrection, cornerstone of the Christian faith. In the Lord’s Death and Resurrection lies our redemption.
To quote Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things magazine, in the memoir chronicling his illness Death on a Friday Afternoon: “Everything that is and ever was and ever will be, the macro and the micro, the galaxies beyond number and the microbes beyond notice - everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened, with what happens, in these three days”.
Habemus Papam, a dramatic comedy written, directed and produced last year by Italian auteur Nanni Moretti about a cardinal elected to the papacy as the successor of John Paul II, paralyzed by anxiety and fear, opens during the Easter season. A case of the sacred and the profane tangled to no end, for some the film is a wolf in sheep skin, for others a non-believer’s tragicomic exploration of our broken humanity. There is ample room in between to talk about esthetic and religious aspects since this film brings many Catholic issues to the forefront.
If we approach Habemus Papam from the context of the director’s other work, some characteristics are readily evident. Emblematic of an Italian cultural left, shaken by the collapse of communism in the 1990s but without an ideology to replace it, Moretti is a satirist whose subject is the political situation in postwar Italy. He has addressed its chaotic complexity, including the frustrations of the left,by becoming the protagonist of his films; the director mixes the personal, the political and the filmic in an idiosyncratic way, an Italian equivalent of Woody Allen, funny, narcissistic and attentive to the nuances of his country’s intellectual and cultural landscape. La messa è finita, Palombella rosa, Caro diario,Aprile and Il Caimano are emblematic features. Moretti’s Palme d’Or winner La stanza del figlio marked an incursion into more psychological territory, as well as the reworking of some key themes.
Habemus Papam – it seems to me – follows the steps of La stanza, exploring the unmooring of an individual who happens to be a cardinal instead of a politician (perhaps the same thing from the director’s perspective). Moretti replaces broad stroke political satire by a gentle form of farce in the depiction of the College of Cardinals,with a Joseph Ratzinger look-alike, playing the haughty humorless German cardinal Brummer, receiving the brunt of the caricature.
The film locates the story firmly in historical territory: it opens in April 2005 with television footage from John Paul II’s funeral; in a seamless visual transition it cuts to the College of Cardinals entering the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, where the election of the new Pontiff will take place,behind locked doors (the etymological meaning of cum clave, room with key). It is a lavishly staged pageantry, and a feat of casting since some one hundred extras really look the part. The solemn procession into the Sistine Chapel, magnificently reproduced in Cinecittà, is quickly followed by an electrical failure, real and symbolic, foreshadowing the tragicomic dynamics of a clueless assembly.
Michel Piccoli plays Cardinal Melville (a filmic nod perhaps to Jean-Pierre Melville), with Moretti taking full advantage of the wonderfully creased face of the 85-year-old actor, whose eyes look simultaneously pained,perplexed and childish. Piccoli carries the weight of the film’s dramatic strand, and turns it to tragedy in the final scene. Paradoxically, the elected Pope’s incognito journey through Rome in three symbolic days, where he encounters a cross section of humanity, free from the Vatican handlers, brings no insight into his character. It is a triumph of performance over substance, with a glimpse or two of tender Catholic behavior, such as the sermon preached by a young parish priest about the need for the Church to change. This motif is explicitly picked by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa’s song heard in the Pope’s apartment and carried non-diegetically to Saint Peter’s Square, where crowds patiently wait for the white fumata. (Unfortunately, the song is not translated in the English-subtitled version).
The second narrative strand is made up of the farcical events unfolding in the conclave, technically still in function since the new Pope has not been publicly announced urbi et orbi, to Rome and to the world. The scenes are a collection of comic skits,slapstick and verbal repartees, held together by Moretti himself as the psychoanalyst secretly brought in by the Vatican press secretary (the Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr) to ‘unblock’ the Pontiff. A secular humanist at odds with this assortment of infantile and unruly clerics, the doctor attempts a psychoanalytic examination of the Pope’s paralyzing fear. It is a witty stand-alone piece. The basketball matches the doctor organizes to keep morale while the locked cardinals wait for the Pope to recover are funny and silly.
This second thread has no dramatic arc, since it is there to provide extended comic relief to the tragedy of the reluctant successor to the chair of Peter. (In contrast, ferocious critiques of clericalism abound in Buñuel’s work; Nazarín, Viridiana, Tristana and their precursor L’âge d’or come to mind. Fellini contributes a solid share in 8 1/2 and,among other examples, the cardinals’ fashion show in Fellini's Roma).
The overall portrayal of a conclave is problematic from a Catholic perspective. Even though the broad strokes used to depict the cardinals can humanize them as a bunch of fussy, pampered old clerics, it should be noted that they are never shown as men of prayer, wisdom or intelligence. Or to put it in Catholic terms, the work of the Holy Spirit is nowhere in sight. Moretti offers a non-believer’s take on a crisis of leadership – along the same lines of Il Caimano , a critique of Silvio Berlusconi before his downfall. The spiritual dynamics of a conclave – its key feature - remain untapped. (Recent and classic films exploring questions of faith and vocation offer an antidote to this lightweight approach, notably Of Gods and Men and Diary of a Country Priest, and even the overtly political take of The Shoes of the Fisherman).
This politely atheistic view of the Catholic Church is clearly conveyed with a pictorial strategy that uses recurrent shots of empty palatial windows framed by fluttering curtains, at the center of which is a void. Occasionally an overweight Swiss Guard moves behind curtains like an exposed Wizard of Oz, to maintain the illusion. Reading Habemus Papam with the eyes of faith, the loss of a sense of transcendence is difficult to miss.
From this secular perspective, the imagery of emptiness is complemented by a carefully designed showcase of ancient rituals and symbols of the Church. In Habemus Papam they are reduced to pure pageantry, locked in a sensorial level where colors, gestures and words are devoid of meaning or context.
Ironically, Moretti is quite obviously in love with the theatricality and sumptuousness of the Vatican traditions, to the point that the majesty of the papal investiture shines through in unexpected moments, most prominently in the film’s tragic climax. The last image shows the empty window overlooking Saint Peter's Square – non habemus Papam – to the crescendo of Miserere, a call to God to have mercy on us, by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer of sacred music. The visual emptiness clashes with the transcendent, and the music infuses the metaphor of the void with its stunning opposite meaning. It is a paradoxical ending, one perhaps far removed from the film’s original intention. Tout est grâce …
The last papal conclave met seven years ago this April,electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the chair of Saint Peter. An account of this conclave very worth reading is chapter four of George Weigel’s God’s Choice. Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, published in 2005. It would make a fascinating documentary about the mysterious mingling of the sacred and the profane, about the Papacy and the Church, which are ultimately in the hands of God.
To quote Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things magazine, in the memoir chronicling his illness Death on a Friday Afternoon: “Everything that is and ever was and ever will be, the macro and the micro, the galaxies beyond number and the microbes beyond notice - everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened, with what happens, in these three days”.
Habemus Papam, a dramatic comedy written, directed and produced last year by Italian auteur Nanni Moretti about a cardinal elected to the papacy as the successor of John Paul II, paralyzed by anxiety and fear, opens during the Easter season. A case of the sacred and the profane tangled to no end, for some the film is a wolf in sheep skin, for others a non-believer’s tragicomic exploration of our broken humanity. There is ample room in between to talk about esthetic and religious aspects since this film brings many Catholic issues to the forefront.If we approach Habemus Papam from the context of the director’s other work, some characteristics are readily evident. Emblematic of an Italian cultural left, shaken by the collapse of communism in the 1990s but without an ideology to replace it, Moretti is a satirist whose subject is the political situation in postwar Italy. He has addressed its chaotic complexity, including the frustrations of the left,by becoming the protagonist of his films; the director mixes the personal, the political and the filmic in an idiosyncratic way, an Italian equivalent of Woody Allen, funny, narcissistic and attentive to the nuances of his country’s intellectual and cultural landscape. La messa è finita, Palombella rosa, Caro diario,Aprile and Il Caimano are emblematic features. Moretti’s Palme d’Or winner La stanza del figlio marked an incursion into more psychological territory, as well as the reworking of some key themes.
Habemus Papam – it seems to me – follows the steps of La stanza, exploring the unmooring of an individual who happens to be a cardinal instead of a politician (perhaps the same thing from the director’s perspective). Moretti replaces broad stroke political satire by a gentle form of farce in the depiction of the College of Cardinals,with a Joseph Ratzinger look-alike, playing the haughty humorless German cardinal Brummer, receiving the brunt of the caricature.The film locates the story firmly in historical territory: it opens in April 2005 with television footage from John Paul II’s funeral; in a seamless visual transition it cuts to the College of Cardinals entering the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, where the election of the new Pontiff will take place,behind locked doors (the etymological meaning of cum clave, room with key). It is a lavishly staged pageantry, and a feat of casting since some one hundred extras really look the part. The solemn procession into the Sistine Chapel, magnificently reproduced in Cinecittà, is quickly followed by an electrical failure, real and symbolic, foreshadowing the tragicomic dynamics of a clueless assembly.
Michel Piccoli plays Cardinal Melville (a filmic nod perhaps to Jean-Pierre Melville), with Moretti taking full advantage of the wonderfully creased face of the 85-year-old actor, whose eyes look simultaneously pained,perplexed and childish. Piccoli carries the weight of the film’s dramatic strand, and turns it to tragedy in the final scene. Paradoxically, the elected Pope’s incognito journey through Rome in three symbolic days, where he encounters a cross section of humanity, free from the Vatican handlers, brings no insight into his character. It is a triumph of performance over substance, with a glimpse or two of tender Catholic behavior, such as the sermon preached by a young parish priest about the need for the Church to change. This motif is explicitly picked by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa’s song heard in the Pope’s apartment and carried non-diegetically to Saint Peter’s Square, where crowds patiently wait for the white fumata. (Unfortunately, the song is not translated in the English-subtitled version).
The second narrative strand is made up of the farcical events unfolding in the conclave, technically still in function since the new Pope has not been publicly announced urbi et orbi, to Rome and to the world. The scenes are a collection of comic skits,slapstick and verbal repartees, held together by Moretti himself as the psychoanalyst secretly brought in by the Vatican press secretary (the Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr) to ‘unblock’ the Pontiff. A secular humanist at odds with this assortment of infantile and unruly clerics, the doctor attempts a psychoanalytic examination of the Pope’s paralyzing fear. It is a witty stand-alone piece. The basketball matches the doctor organizes to keep morale while the locked cardinals wait for the Pope to recover are funny and silly.
This second thread has no dramatic arc, since it is there to provide extended comic relief to the tragedy of the reluctant successor to the chair of Peter. (In contrast, ferocious critiques of clericalism abound in Buñuel’s work; Nazarín, Viridiana, Tristana and their precursor L’âge d’or come to mind. Fellini contributes a solid share in 8 1/2 and,among other examples, the cardinals’ fashion show in Fellini's Roma).
The overall portrayal of a conclave is problematic from a Catholic perspective. Even though the broad strokes used to depict the cardinals can humanize them as a bunch of fussy, pampered old clerics, it should be noted that they are never shown as men of prayer, wisdom or intelligence. Or to put it in Catholic terms, the work of the Holy Spirit is nowhere in sight. Moretti offers a non-believer’s take on a crisis of leadership – along the same lines of Il Caimano , a critique of Silvio Berlusconi before his downfall. The spiritual dynamics of a conclave – its key feature - remain untapped. (Recent and classic films exploring questions of faith and vocation offer an antidote to this lightweight approach, notably Of Gods and Men and Diary of a Country Priest, and even the overtly political take of The Shoes of the Fisherman).This politely atheistic view of the Catholic Church is clearly conveyed with a pictorial strategy that uses recurrent shots of empty palatial windows framed by fluttering curtains, at the center of which is a void. Occasionally an overweight Swiss Guard moves behind curtains like an exposed Wizard of Oz, to maintain the illusion. Reading Habemus Papam with the eyes of faith, the loss of a sense of transcendence is difficult to miss.
From this secular perspective, the imagery of emptiness is complemented by a carefully designed showcase of ancient rituals and symbols of the Church. In Habemus Papam they are reduced to pure pageantry, locked in a sensorial level where colors, gestures and words are devoid of meaning or context.
Ironically, Moretti is quite obviously in love with the theatricality and sumptuousness of the Vatican traditions, to the point that the majesty of the papal investiture shines through in unexpected moments, most prominently in the film’s tragic climax. The last image shows the empty window overlooking Saint Peter's Square – non habemus Papam – to the crescendo of Miserere, a call to God to have mercy on us, by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer of sacred music. The visual emptiness clashes with the transcendent, and the music infuses the metaphor of the void with its stunning opposite meaning. It is a paradoxical ending, one perhaps far removed from the film’s original intention. Tout est grâce …
The last papal conclave met seven years ago this April,electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the chair of Saint Peter. An account of this conclave very worth reading is chapter four of George Weigel’s God’s Choice. Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, published in 2005. It would make a fascinating documentary about the mysterious mingling of the sacred and the profane, about the Papacy and the Church, which are ultimately in the hands of God.
