Not long ago, the Golden Globe Awards decided the best drama of the year. "The Young Pope", co-produced by Sky, HBO and Canal+, missed this year's competition because it has not yet launched in the United States. However, even if the show meets the schedule, it is difficult to predict whether it will be nominated for Golden Globe, because "The Young Pope" is still relatively different compared to "The Crown", "Game of Thrones" and "Stranger Things". Quality, but in all fairness, no matter how you look at it, the show's performance is top-notch. For example, if the pope is the pope of the world’s believers, then the film master and director Sorrentino’s advantage is that he can use the world’s best actor in this play: British actor Jude Lowe, Oscar actress Diane Keaton, Almodovar's golden queen Javier Camara, Italy's Venetian actress Silvio Orlando...This configuration is as you wish.
At first glance, "The Young Pope" is completely a "Game of Thrones", which is quite similar to "House of Cards", but then the plot begins to turn, from a purely intrigue between the new and old powers and evolves into a generational basis. Ask the pope to seek the growth story of love, truth, and faith. In fact, "The Legend of Zhen Huan" is also a growth story, and even any court drama is a growth story, but the difference is that the "young pope" has become more mature and pure after experiencing everything, and is better at controlling his own power. It is not becoming more sophisticated, showing "helpless belly black" and "life desolation". Of course, rigorously speaking, this is only an inference drawn from the first season. It may be too early to make such a decision. The second season, which has already been put on the agenda, may give a new answer.
For this season alone, the separation of the mere conspiracy narrative is achieved through family member relationships and religious mysticism. The pope in the play is an orphan, and the experience of being abandoned by his parents in his childhood is a shadow that he can hardly walk through in his life; Sister Mary, childhood friend Dussorière and later Bishop Spencer gave him a second family, respectively Played the roles of mother, brother and father. This "family" is built on the basis of religion. The relationship of the "family" is naturally not as close as blood, but it is enough to dismantle part of the political and conspiracy power of the Holy See. On the other hand, the pope under the lens of director Sorrentino looks like an ordinary person, but there is also an extraordinary thing: in ten episodes, the pope has performed miracles in the same way-kneeling and praying four times: Once he became the pope himself, once helped the guardian's infertile wife give birth to a child, once resurrected the mother of his childhood friend, and once used the hand of God to choke the throat of a corrupt nun. The four prayers run through the whole process, achieving good goals with forces beyond the reach of politics (or conspiracy), so it naturally breaks the tight political control of the Holy See.
The characterization of "The Young Pope" is very interesting. Unlike typical American dramas that deeply portray the pros and cons of the characters (the so-called "three-dimensional"), Sorrentino deliberately keeps a distance from the characters in this play, which makes the appearance of the characters very blurred. one side? Two sides? Three or four sides? can not see clearly. It's hard to see the full picture of anyone's life in the play. How did the Pope know that Sister Mary is an orphan? How do you know that your "scandal" is in the hands of Secretary of State Vojero? How do you know that Guterres is gay? There is no explanation in the play, and these issues will even affect the audience's evaluation of the pope, making it unclear whether he is a rare saint or an unprecedented politician-this is still the undisputed number one in the play Roles, let alone other supporting roles of all kinds. In many cases, the personalities and past events of many characters are hidden in the smoke bombs thrown by the screenwriter to make them invisible, but they often produce unexpected sparks during the collision, which makes the plot direction change. So, of course, we can say that "fuzziness" is a major failure of the screenwriter, but it is better to say that it is a major feature, and it is a key factor that promotes the development of the plot without turning around in place.
The ambiguity is consistent with the pope's positioning of himself in the play, and it is consistent with the religious mysticism atmosphere that has been exaggerated in the play, and at the same time shows the creative characteristics of Sorrentino all the time. Although "The Young Pope" is a "miniseries", it is like a "big movie", which can be included in the sequence of Sorrentino's film works. Formally speaking, the use of a large number of soft lights and mixed music styles reveal unique styles and ingenuity; whether it is the best foreign language film of the Oscars "Sheng", Sorrentino consistently uses fragmented, prose-style methods to tell the story. Here, one leg and the other, many seemingly insignificant scenes and intentions are interspersed together. Although it makes people confused, but Condensed into a kind of atmosphere and intention, the so-called "discretion and gathering together."
This modernist structure is also the most important reason why people compare Sorrentino and Fellini's (also an Italian director) "mosaic" works. In essence, although American TV dramas have involved postmodern texts a long time ago, the breakthroughs in form are still lacklustre. "The Young Pope" is Sorrentino's refurbishment of the American drama concept, which takes the plot as the absolute center, the straightforward narrative method as the primary narrative method, and the suspense creation as the main selling point. It is an occurrence between European art film directors and the American television industry. The wonderful chemical reaction of the movie is just like Leoné (the Italian director!)'s reconstruction of western movies, which is a kind of "modernist American drama" different from the past.
Sorrentino was not the first to take the pope to start. After all, one of the problems that Italian movies, Italians, and even the country of Italy always need to face and deal with is the relationship between the state and religion, body and soul. The Vatican is in the heart of Rome, and the Catholic Church is also in the heart of every believer; the pope’s mental state is a portrayal of the mental state of the Italians and even believers all over the world. From this point of view, Nanni Moretti (again, an Italian director!)'s "The Birth of the Pope" (2011) and "The Young Pope" both deal with the same problem-how can a chaotic spiritual world be obtained? Tranquility, how religion and secularity are connected through the character of the pope, and how personal spiritual crises are closely related to others—and these problems are related to directors such as Antonioni and Pasolini (or Italian director!) The spiritual crisis of modernity discussed is the same.
However, "The Young Pope" is still full of special sombre traces. As an American drama, the strong "authority" of "The Young Pope" is also reflected in the stories and topics that Van Sorrentino involves, inevitably involving "beauty" and "ugliness", "body" and "soul", The unity of opposites between "growth" and "decay"-just like the old nuns who can send away a group of birds with the breath in "A Beautiful City", the living Buddha floating in the air in "Young and Vigorous", religious figures have always been They are all the objects of his love, and they are the excellent carriers of these big and improper concepts. The Pope played by Jude Law is the same: he is almost narcissistic about his physical beauty, but he is completely disdainful to talk about it; he is called a saint, but he has taken the name of "protection" to provoke believers everywhere. , Is called a demon. The contrast between the Pope and the Secretary of State and the opposition between the Vatican and the head of folk religion are all born out of growth stories and depictions of mental states, but they are higher than them, reflecting Sorrentino's discussion on the aesthetic level. Throughout the film and television industry, there are few directors who dare to discuss this big concept. Those who dare to raise this kind of problem in American dramas are either crazy or genius, Sorrentino must be one of them.
——The Pope is not the case. At the end of this season, the Pope saw his longing parents go away step by step, and fell on the podium happily and painfully, and a cloud in the shape of the Virgin Mary appeared in space. The camera keeps pulling up and moving out of the earth, reminiscent of the famous subjective perspective at the end of Lars von Trier's famous work "Breaking the Waves". Faith, faith, what use do you want? Sorrentino smiled as he hid behind the camera.
"To whom will the arm of the Lord be revealed?"
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