CONCLAVE

There's a real wit to Straughan's screenplay, in particular how beautifully constructed all of the characters are. This is important when everyone is essentially required to wear the same thing. We need to know who all these men are, where they stand and what kind of Pope they might be. At times this means relying on pops of heavy-handed exposition, but the screenplay seems to be aware of this, and those moments are smoothed over as much as possible. Central to the narrative is Cardinal Lawrence, and it's in him that we see the push-and-pull of this election at its most potent. There is not just the question of what is right for the Church and its followers, but the enormous ambition that must come with anyone putting their name forward for one of the most important appointments in the world. Many argue in the film that the perfect candidate for Pope is someone who does not want the position, but as Cardinal Lawrence begins to discover, such a man fundamentally cannot exist. When it is within arms' reach, any man will begin to imagine himself taking the throne, and that ambition may be enough for him to sway his convictions and forsake his values.

It's then up to Berger and his collaborators to find a way to make this conclave feel cinematic, and just as with 'All Quiet', he does so with aggressive bombast. That might sound like a criticism, and in other hands it may well have been, but it becomes very clear very quickly why Berger was a good fit for this material. The squabbling of cardinals is in itself a kind of battle. So much of 'Conclave' is about deception and shadows, and so cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine emphasises this quality in his approach. There's an almost gothic texture to the look of 'Conclave', the expressionist lighting in concert with the harsh blacks and reds in Suzie Davies' production design and Lisy Christl's costume design. Complementary to the themes of the film, the aesthetics are a clash of the classical and the modern, and not always with a sense of harmony.

Fontaine is also careful in how he positions the characters within the spaces themselves. They both feel trapped and swallowed, confined to the rabbit warren of the Vatican before emerging into the vast, endless ceilings of the Chapel, curiously under-lit to give the sense of a fog descending upon them. There's also a sharpness to the editing from Nick Emerson, and it's here that he and Berger give the film its sense of propulsion and craft conversations into battles. You can feel the building rhythm of the film, like a metronome getting progressively faster, so that even with so few "set piece" moments in the film, it still feels like so much of consequence has happened.

Fitting neatly into place is Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann's highly aggressive and repetitive score. Again, this could sound like criticism, but this repetition is so cleverly and at times comically employed. He takes the same principles he applied so well in 'All Quiet' with its horrific battle scenes and turns the simplest of actions in 'Conclave' into acts of violence. A simple scene of food being served feels a hell of a lot more important when the orchestra is going for broke over the speakers. This encapsulates the essence of Berger's approach to 'Conclave' - in many ways, he treats it like a war film, two sides engaged in an ideological fight to the death, and by virtue of being responsible for one of the better war films of the last few years, he knows the kind of aural and visual language such a fight requires.

It's also fascinating the way the film navigates issues of gender within the Church. While the cardinals dominate almost all the action, a voiceless chorus of nuns dominates the background. It is their job to feed and take care of the cardinals, to be silent and attentive, and it's to Berger's credit that he makes their voicelessness a key point of the first half of the film. By necessity, 'Conclave' never leaves the confines of the Vatican, but these women become a proxy for how this debate of tradition versus progress can affect those outside of the bubble of the cardinals. Even if the cardinals aren't aware of them, we are, and their silence is practically thunderous. It highlights another level of hypocrisy at play - that these men can discuss the need for reform and openness but can't often see the servitude they have relegated these women to.

This means that much of this subplot falls on the shoulders of the great Isabella Rossellini ('Blue Velvet') as Sister Agnes, the sister in charge of organising the nuns in her care. The handling of this character is perhaps the biggest misstep in the film. We begin to see and hear Sister Agnes more and more as the film goes on, suggesting that a pressure cooker within her may be about to blow, likely due to the dismissive way in which the cardinals treat her and her fellow sisters. When that moment comes though, Sister Agnes is reduced to a plot device, denied her full moment of retaliation. Perhaps this is more in keeping with the reality of the situation, that a nun would never allow herself to fully admonish a room full of cardinals, but after waiting for Isabella Rossellini to have the show-stopping moment she deserves, it's over before it's really even begun.

While Rossellini is a regrettably small part of this ensemble, it's an impressive ensemble nonetheless. John Lithgow ('Beatriz at Dinner'), Lucian Msamati ('See How They Run') and Sergio Castellitto ('Paris, Je T'aime') are all delicious as three of the cardinals vying for the top job, each given ample opportunity to throw witty theatrical barbs at one another. Stanley Tucci is a quiet standout as Cardinal Bellini, the most progressive candidate and the closest the race has to someone who maybe doesn't actually want the job. The film belongs to Ralph Fiennes though, and his performance here is further proof of what an extraordinary actor he is. Cardinal Lawrence is a man who prefers to stay away from attention, and is now thrust into the middle of a viper pit, tasked with keeping the vipers at bay. You can feel him desperately trying to hold himself and the situation together, and his moments of solitude give Fiennes an opportunity to explore a vulnerability we rarely see nowadays from this actor. He is the stable core of this film, and while everyone else gets to have a lot of fun with the melodrama, it's up to him to keep everything in balance.

I began this review with reference to the film's first act climax, but one can't discuss 'Conclave' without also making reference to its ultimate climax, where all the threads of the film collide. I won't reveal the surprise here, suffice it to say that the responses from the audience in my screening suggested that, like me, they did not see it coming. It's a twist that, by all rights, should absolutely not work. I would even go so far as to call it narratively dangerous in how easily it could have derailed the entire film. The fact that it somehow, somehow manages to work is a testament to the care with which the entire film has been constructed. Though it can lose steam on occasion, 'Conclave' succeeds because of the clarity of its thematic concern, that of what purpose the Catholic Church can serve as an institution going forward. Almost everything is in service to this concern, and as a consequence, to making the shocking revelation at the end of the film work. In a way, it is this debate made manifest, the ticking time bomb revealing itself to be in the last place and the last form you would expect. As the dust settles on our surprise, the film eloquently asserts its position, and even while your mind is still spinning, you realise how cleverly and carefully this film has earned this ending.

'Conclave' is more fascinating than it is enthralling, but that's one of its best assets. I went in expecting scenery-chewing melodrama and instead was met with some genuinely arresting provocations on the role of these institutions in our contemporary world. 'Conclave' wisely takes religious faith as a given and doesn't choose to interrogate this, but instead asks how religious faith is wielded as an instrument of social and political change. It does this through the guise of a political thriller, giving the election of the Pope the same kind of consequential drama as the election of a President. Though it confines itself to the claustrophobic walls of the Vatican, it's a film acutely aware of how decisions made in such dimly lit rooms have consequences for the world outside. Certainly isn't just an enemy of faith but an enemy of progress, the notion that the way we live is a thing set in stone. To have certainty is to deny doubt, and to deny doubt is to deny the ability to question, to disagree, to discuss. And to deny that is to deny the opportunity to do better.