Brief premise:

the election of the pope is decided by the cardinals gathered in conclave (a right dating back to 1059, established by a council at the Lateran desired by Pope Nicholas II) by secret ballot requiring a two-thirds majority. The conclave meets no sooner than 15 days and no later than 22 days after the death of the previous pontiff. The cardinals throughout the duration of the conclave may not have any outside contact. Four votes per day are held for the ballots and their outcome is signaled to the faithful outside with a black smoke if negative, white if positive. Any baptized celibate male can be elected pope (although the election of a non-bishop has rarely occurred) and if he has not yet received holy orders they are immediately conferred on him and he is consecrated bishop. The rules in effect for the sede vacante, the conduct of the conclave, and the election of the new pope were promulgated in the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis by Pope John Paul II in 1996.

The film opens with the cardinals of the conclave electing the pope, who emits a howl of pain and begins his flight from the seat of power.

The psychoanalyst arrives and has to speak in the presence of everyone without mentioning his mother, his childhood, or even the pope's sexuality, and the only question left is to ask if he has problems with his faith; the pope will reply with a flat NO.

An even more surreal find in Moretti's film is to have to abdicate, he the "non-believing" male psychoanalyst, the function of analysis, now short of scientific certainty, to his ex-wife.

So the pope will find himself in analysis by a female psychoanalyst who will convince him that he is a victim of the caregiving deficit that the holy father will try to remedy with cream doughnuts.

All this accompanied by the platonic shadows of a pope who is not there except behind the curtains of his apartments simply because he "loves life" and so will wander for days in the cozy Roman spaces.

The still unofficial holy father does not feel adequate to the role.

Here stops the ingenious sense of this extraordinary film: to invest oneself with power requires embodiment in the character without it being able to be shaken by deep existential doubt.

This pope, a figure so lovable precisely because he is full of doubt, modesty, life, and acceptance, feels inadequate; the very one who would seem the embodiment of simplicity, in a context so luxuriously metaphysical and algidly out of place, baroque, formal, as well as "naively" pompous.

Can power meet the doubt of inadequacy for the role?

Perhaps not, Moretti argues, the more the question is asked the more doubt arises.

Then might it not be that the very people who sense their own limitations would be best suited for roles of power?

Perhaps if the species evolves it abstains from power?

Are power and doubt inversely proportional?

A film that will be talked about a lot, great for Cannes, funny, at times brilliant, surreal in a journey between fiction and reality told by a superior and particularly refined Moretti.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice