ART – WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 20:55 – CINEMA
In opera we call it assuming a role. For Cardinal Melville, once an unsuccessful candidate for the theater conservatory, we say “papal election.” And, like a baritone, preparing to sing Don Juandiscovers that some tones are missing from his register, the cardinal suffers a strange paralysis. We have a Pope, but the Pope is no longer his own master. Barely elected, without even bothering to choose his papal name, Melville (Michel Piccoli) jumps over the walls of the Vatican City and gets lost in secular Rome.
Despite its Latin title, despite the weight of the Roman Catholic rituals that organize the first sequences, Habemus Papam, released in 2011, it has little to do with religion and faith. It is rather a lament, written, directed and performed by Nanni Moretti, a showman who has lived in the eyes of others for several decades, to the point of having developed a certain fatigue, increased by the approach of old age.
This fatigue is due to the self-esteem wounds that public life has inflicted on the most narcissistic film authors, and these laments give Habemus Papam a comic dimension. But the essence of this film, which often moves, is made of melancholic material, of a poetic reflection on duty and pleasure, freedom and its limits.
Mediocre electoral process
The force of emotion emanates first from a man, Michel Piccoli (died 2020). We do not see it in the first sequences, which show – in a montage of diabolical skill that mixes actuality and fictitious staging – the death of the predecessor and the meeting of the conclave.
Nanni Moretti shows the cardinals as a group of elderly people initially anxious that the pontifical chalice be kept away from their lips. In a gesture of playful perversity, Moretti denies the members of the curia the quality of political beings. They are just the administrators of a society with an undefined objective (there will never be a question of theology) who would like to solve the question of management at the lowest cost.
The electoral process becomes even more ridiculous due to the intervention of journalistic puppets. In twenty minutes, the spectacular nature of a papal election is confirmed, and it is at that moment when the figure who must occupy the foreground claims his status as a free man. Instead of appearing on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, Cardinal Melville lets out a heart-rending howl.
You have 21.91% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
