A bit in the manner of Edward Berger’s previous film, the surprisingly successful ALL QUIET ON THE FRONT –winner of four Oscars out of nine nominations–, CONCLAVE It is a story that is characterized by its sobriety, its elegance and its correctness. A political-religious drama that takes place during the election of a new Pope, the German director’s film has a neat and careful staging, a classic rhythm and a group of main characters who navigate through personal, ideological and ethical conflicts. Berger’s trick is to give a certain patina of supposed respectability and prestige to a plot that, filmed with other formal criteria, could well have been an intense suspense story, a lavish melodrama or even a violent and very pulp police with surprising and shocking resolution.
Just imagine the plot of the same novel – written by Robert Harris, an author who specializes in accessible crime stories such as I ACCUSE, ENIGMA o THE HIDDEN WRITERmany of which take place within the framework of specific historical events –, in the hands of directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Paolo Sorrentino or Brian De Palma, to name just a few with stylistic approaches very different from Berger’s, and one would come across something very but very different, in every sense. And while that is not a task that makes much sense to do, the plot of the film lends itself to that game since it combines a dry, hard and harsh universe such as a cardinals convention with all the tricks, traps and surprises of an “airport thriller.”
Berger opts for sobriety and CONCLAVEfrom that starting point, it works fine. By not taking risks it is not surprising either – I am referring to the formal aspect, the plot does have several surprises – but it fulfills the task of delivering a film that seems more serious and profound than it really is. It all begins with the death of Pope Gregory XVII, which leads the Vatican to organize its striking and traditional elections with the Cardinals who arrive from all over the world. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, the British Dean of the College of Cardinals, in charge of organizing the vote. From the outset we learn that he has no interest in being Pope, but we know that he wants to preserve the apparently progressive line that the deceased had. And for that, his strongest candidate is Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an American, who has a similar ideological position.
But in the race Bellini has complicated rivals, difficult to beat, and all more conservative than him. On the one hand there is the Canadian Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), a priest who is more opportunistic than anything else and whose ambition for the position is evident. On the most reactionary end is the Italian Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a guy who wants the Church to return to its more medieval and bellicose format. And in the middle, Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), from Nigeria, a traditional conservative whose great drawback, for Lawrence and Bellini, is his homophobia. But when the results of the first votes begin to come out (the white smoke of the elected Pope only comes out when a candidate reaches two-thirds), it is clear that everything is very even, and that it will be very difficult for Lawrence to get enough votes to your candidate.
In the middle of the numbers is behind the scenes, the hallway secrets, the papal chess game. In the convent where everyone spends their nights (the participants are “kidnapped”, supposedly without contact with the real world) the nuns circulate in silence, women who perhaps know more than they let on. Among them, Sister Agnes stands out, who during the first hour hardly participates in the actions but, being played by Isabella Rossellini, one knows that she will end up having a greater weight in the plot. There is also a Mexican cardinal, Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who has recently arrived at the Vatican having been targeted by the Pope before he died, whom the others do not know and who, strikingly, appears in the vote count. And in parallel, a series of violent events, probably attacks, are taking place in the streets. Or so it seems, because they are not told anything about what happens outside.
If we take into account this group of colorful characters, the environment in which the story takes place, the great differences between the candidates and the secrets of many of them that are coming to light, CONCLAVE It could very well be a far-fetched film, one of those “yellow” and somewhat ridiculous thrillers that strike on the side of absurdity and, as soon as they are consumed, they are forgotten. But Berger has other intentions. Her film attempts to be a treatise on faith, doubts, the possible paths of the Church, the role of women in organized religion and the rot that many institutions cover up to survive.
And in his own way he achieves it. The problem is that the plot is still more typical of a soap opera than the severe religious drama that he believes he is filming. AND CONCLAVE It exists in that liminal space between prestigious drama and somewhat absurd police drama. The silences and gravity handled by Lawrence – whose point of view the film strictly follows – and the severe questions he asks about his faith and the political filth of the Vatican are typical of a Bressonian drama, but the script leads him to act. almost like a hotel detective, in a turn that curiously brings him closer to his character of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. His Lawrence is an anguished shepherd from a Dreyer film thrown into the plot of a season of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING.
But the conviction that Fiennes brings to the character – the same as Tucci, Rossellini and the others – allows one to buy that gravity, that depressive parsimony with which the man carries himself, as if he himself carried a heavy cross on his back. Berger films everything around him with equal or greater solemnity – each movement of the cardinals in space is organized like a painting – and the fact that a large part of the plot takes place in the Sistine Chapel adds an extra amount of grandeur to that somber development. . That’s why, when several revelations about the ending arrive – especially one of them – it will feel like it was imported from another movie. Berger works it with care and politically correct elegance, but it is still a twist typical of those that arise between the penultimate and the last episode of the season of a series.
CONCLAVE It is still an interesting film to analyze outside of its formal modes and resources. Within its tangled narrative machinery, it is a film that observes the changes in society and how the church chooses to stand in front of them, puts into discussion very disparate, almost opposite views of the world within that institution and, above all, asks about faith and to what extent it can be used as a weapon to intensify conflicts and increase disputes. At its core, the film is a progressive fable with a conservative format. And therein lies the curious friction that runs through it, from beginning to end.
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