Blood on a Tesla: Conclave
You can hear the trepidation asphyxiating these men.
Grade: A
Who’s the Pope doesn’t matter to you. You’re not Catholic and you had no idea there were fights between liberals and conservatives even inside the Catholic Church…until you saw Conclave.
Who’s the Pope matters to Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, and the cardinals he assembles in Vatican City to elect the next Pope. Director Edward Berger opens this psychological thriller with Lawrence in close up from over his shoulder trekking across Vatican City to the dead Pope’s bedside. Berger’s use of sound is the most granular and meticulous you’ll ever hear. Each molecule in the pavement ground beneath Lawrence’s sole, each particle of oxygen and carbon dioxide that passes in and out of his mouth in hurried and anxious breaths and the leather handle of his briefcase squeezed beneath his fingers all grate like sandpaper wiped on your cheek.
The film’s score of sharp violin strums composed by Volker Bertelmann is only half its soundtrack. The other half is the cardinals’ heavy breaths as they decide who to vote for, the click of their pens when they write down their votes, and the snap of the hole being broken in their paper ballots when a needle is stabbed through each ballot and a red string run through the paper. They’re all as sharp as the head of a nail being dropped on a glass floor. You can hear the trepidation asphyxiating these men.
If you still aren’t convinced who they choose is important to you, listen to them deliberate. Hear what weights on their minds as they choose the next Pope. “There is one sin I have come to fear above all others: certainty,” Lawrence tells the cardinals. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity.” He hopes their next Pope will be one who doubts not one who is certain. He prays for a Pope who doesn’t quickly or harshly divide the world into the right and the wrong.
Later, a suicide bomber attacks Vatican City and Lawrence’s conservative rival Goffredo Tedesco (played by Sergio Castellitto) draws the cardinals’ attention to this result, as he calls it, of failing to distinguish between right and wrong and protecting the former against the later. We welcome Muslims into our land and they exterminate us, he says. He prays for a Pope who understands, in his own words, that they are fighting “a religious war.” “This is a conclave Aldo, it’s not a war” Lawrence tells his fellow liberal Aldo Bellini (played by Stanley Tucci) as they plan how to secure the votes for Aldo and make sure Tedesco doesn’t become the next Pope. “It is a war,” Aldo says waving his hands, “and you have to commit to a side.” Where do we draw the line between what we tolerate and don’t? Why do we act as though we’re fighting a war when none of us hold guns? How many times have we encountered these very problems in the last ten years?
Berger takes hold of the Catholic Church, this medieval institution, like a medicine ball, and throws it against the brick wall graffitied with the label “The 21st Century.” The Cardinals walk and talk amongst marble and stone floors, walls and columns in severe, post-industrial whites, blacks and greys and against this backdrop their red robes look like drops of blood on the hood of a white Tesla.
Berger will shatter your faith that who is Pope can’t be a question anchored heavily enough in the real world to make a thriller. Conclave isn’t just about who gets to be Pope. The issues the Catholic Church must face to decide that are the same issues we all must face if we want to survive the 21st century.