Critique
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Despite its high-flying cast, Edward Berger's clerical thriller about the pope's succession lacks steam.
“Maybe hell doesn’t exist. Maybe hell is just having to listen to your grandparents breathe through their noses while they eat sandwiches.” This quote, which is not from Dostoyevsky but from Jim Carrey, haunts the first minutes of Conclave. Heavy breathing of old people struggling with their personal hell. Suffering silhouettes soliloquizing, with heavy heads and shuffling steps, along endless marble corridors. We are neither in the emergency room nor in the nursing home but in the Vatican, where Cardinal Lawrence, on the verge of giving up everything to go raise goats in Tuscany, must face the unspeakable: the death of the Pope. Which forces him to supervise the election of a new holy father in a hermetically sealed Sistine chapel. And incidentally ensure that, among all the old men with variable ventilation who have come to present themselves to the succession, we do not choose a retrograde pig or a mariole with an unsortable CV.
Unintentional comic
More than a clerical thriller, Conclave is a Pandora's box full of Russian dolls. From the parallel between the world of the Church and that of politics – the Vatican has its Trumps, Strauss-Kahn and Nixon – we quickly move on to a fierce replica of patriarchal society – old men breathing through their noses while eating their tortellini while the nuns flutter between the tables, non-existent, including for those who are eager for modernity. And finally to all
