Overview
The Holy See — Vatican City — is one of the world's smallest countries, nestled entirely inside of the city of Rome. It normally rates above its size in world attention, but for the next two months it's going to to get a double dose of international focus. Now that His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has taken the almost unprecedented step of stepping down from the pontificate, a story on which most (but not all) journalists got a slow start, we're bound to be getting a lot of incoming footage of this tiny city.
But before you get onto the usual round of Latin glossaries, explanations of Vatican lore and law, and no shortage of betting odds. But it also means a lot of time spent with camera staring at the unmoving windows and quiet chimneys of St Peter's Basilica.
If your Latin feels a little rusty, you might feel the need to remind yourself about this tiny city state. To help, Concrete Playground has put together this list of five top Vatican movies to get you in the mood for the next two months of Church and State.
1. The Borgias
What The Borgias lacks in HBO-like budget, it makes up for with sheer bloody-minded ambition. It starts with the elevation of Rodrigo Borgia (Jeremy Irons) from cardinal to Pope Alexander VI. Breaking with fictional tradition, it takes the violent ambition of the Borgias and places it in the context of their equally violently ambitious contemporaries. It's also okay (though far from perfect) for historical accuracy. Not least in Gina McKee's depiction of Caterina Sforza: the woman who pulled off the most badass flash in history.
2. The Pope Must Die
Shorter on historical accuracy or, indeed, any accuracy, The Pope Must Die is a lightweight film, somewhat held together by the presence of Robbie Coltrane, later to be famous for playing the lead in Cracker and Hagrid in Harry Potter. The film was a farcical, nice-guy power fantasy, much in the vein of Kevin Kline's later, pre-Aaron Sorkin presidential comedy Dave. The film spends time behind the scenes at movie Vatican, but is much more of a Prince and the Pauper fable than anything approaching genuine behind the scenes.
3. We Have a Pope
Although director Nanni Moretti is best known as a comedian, his work on serious films like The Son's Room have cemented his ability to cross genre. We Have a Pope is named after the proclamation that accompanies the arrival of a new pontiff, usually announced from the papal balcony to expectant crowds below. Except, in this film that announcement never happens. Pope-elect Melville (Michael Piccoli) gets cold feet the moment before the proclamation, and the rest of the film follows a considered will-he-won't-he as Melville decides if he has a future as the leader of the Catholic world. Audiences expected a papal farce from Moretti. And, while the film has its absurd and funny moments as the Vatican bureaucracy tries to deal with a Pope-free limbo (not the least with some biting, volleyball-based satire of Australia's chances in the World Cup), it's neither pro-church nor anti-church; instead, Moretti's film explores the weight of responsibility resting on this maybe-Pope-to-be's unwilling shoulders.
4. Fellini's Roma
Federico Fellini examined, and defined, huge swathes of Italian culture in his post-WWII career. He famously flew a statue of Jesus over St Peters — the church at the heart of the Vatican — at the beginning of La Dolce Vita. But Fellini's lesser-known Roma goes the whole hog. As part of its combination of reporterly and exaggerated depictions of Italian, post-war male life and Italian history (not to mention a cameo from an Italian-speaking Gore Vidal), Fellini takes Roma's audience to an imagined fashion show of papal garments. Nuns with oversized, wing-like wimples. Cardinals on roller-skates. The Pope as sun god. Empty, glittering robes. The parade satirises the financial excess, ornamentation, and mystery of Italian religious ritual.
5. Angels and Demons
Swapping out The Da Vinci Code's Audrey Tautou for Ewan McGregor, Angels and Demons had the distinction of being the only film in this list to get close to almost filming in the Vatican itself. Although the Vatican famously banned the production from using St Peter's as a filming location, the production simply sent people in with cameras disguised as tourists to take high resolution background photos later stitched together into a passable vatican using CG.