Be careful, it's a film based on a novel by Robert Harris, an author as successful as Dan Brown, but better. We were damned intrigued thirty-odd years ago when he reached the best seller with Fatherland based on the fictional hypothesis of a war in Europe won by the Nazis.
Harris likes to play with “as ifs.” What would the world be like if Adolf Hitler had prevailed? Things like that. Now in the Conclave try to imagine a decidedly heterodox papacy (when heterodox we only learn in the final five minutes).
The film opens with the death of a sitting pontiff. Cardinal Lawrence, very faithful to the good soul, is entrusted with the task of organizing a new conclave. Lawrence doesn't just have to look at the progress of the work. But to check whether the possible candidates for succession are truly capable of wearing the shoes of the fisherman (the shoes of the fisherman, that is, Pietro, as another famous novel is titled).
Lawrence will have to vote like the others, but in the meantime he will have the task of checking whether an aspiring pontiff is truly worthy of the greatest of honors. The African candidate is not, a very good person, but with a weakness for affectionate friendships for reverend mothers.
Not the American cardinal, who seems to have a great advantage in the first votes (but it seems he secured his votes through intrigue and corruption; compared to Cardinal Tremblay, Nixon would make us look like an amateur). It is, because he is morally unassailable, the Italian Tedesco, a very over the top Sergio Castellitto. But how can one wish that someone who wants to restore the Latin mass, who spouts slogans worthy of Trump, could be suitable? The choice is so difficult that at a certain point Lawrence was tempted to “enter the field” and run for the throne of Peter himself. Until an ideal competitor emerges, an enlightened prelate, one who has been through all the theaters of war in the world, who knows suffering like few of Christ's people. Is he the Fisherman's heir? Of course it is he, concludes Lawrence, who is preparing to give his unconditional support. But he takes his investigations too far. Until an investigation into a Swiss clinic that the candidate had visited for a small problem. What's the problem? Hold fast. The quasi-pontiff is a hermaphrodite.
This twist hits a little too hard. Let's say that it screws up a dramaturgical structure that had kept the preview audience captivated for two hours. Rightly enthralled. Berger's direction, Peter Straugan's screenplay, Oscar-winning acting (Fiennes, Tucci, the viper John Lithgow) had offered a very classy show, with a charge of suspense worthy of a White House convention.
Then, the punch in the stomach at the last minute (which sparked huge laughter in the audience at the preview). Harris in his meticulous search for the “as if” of alternative plots has gone a little too far, very close to the ridiculous.
So close that at the end of the viewing we were aroused by a fierce suspicion that the alternative Pope is the latest prank devised by the priests of “political correctness”. Think about it, a vicar of Christ who has two sexes in his body, maybe someone is seriously thinking about it?
CONCLAVE With Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, Sergio Castellitto and John Lithgow. Directed by Edward Berger. USA production 2024. Duration: 2 hours.
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