“God sees abilities in me I don’t have,” laments the protagonist of Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti’s new movie. Such self-doubt is hardly novel, but Melville (Michel Piccoli) has a special stake in God’s opinion of him — he’s just been elected pope.
Although best known in this country for the playful Dear Diary and the melancholy The Son’s Room, Moretti is a committed leftist and a stalwart opponent of Silvio Berlusconi. His previous film, The Caiman, lunged for the then-prime minister’s throat. Yet We Have a Pope is not the filmmaker’s next assault on a Roman patriarch. It’s a half-sweet, half-rueful existential drama in which the satire comes secondary.
Moretti, who usually takes the lead role in his films, here plays a supporting character: Bruzzi, a psychiatrist summoned urgently to the Vatican after Melville insists he can’t take the job. But the movie belongs to Piccoli and his character, who creates a backstage drama by refusing to address the faithful awaiting their new pontiff.
In cafes around town, people speculate that the new pope has already died, and the Vatican can’t admit it. In a harsher lampoon, the Vatican’s harried spokesman (Jerzy Stuhr) would have the reluctant pope iced and proceed to the next candidate. Instead, he announces that the Church’s new leader has retired to his chambers to pray, showing his admirable humility.
Bruzzi’s session with the new pope is a flop, and so the Church sends Melville to the city’s “second best” — the shrink’s estranged wife (Margherita Buy). Rather than revealing his identity, Melville tells her that he’s an actor.