41
THE YOUNG POPE
CATHERINE O'RAWE
cultura e società
Watching the first two hours of Paolo Sorrentino’s Sky-produced entry into the Italian quality TV landscape, The Young Pope, you could be forgiven for thinking it is Il Divo with cassocks. Like Sorrentino’s 2008 exploration of the nature of former prime minister Giulio Andreotti’s power, The Young Pope is intensely homosocial, packed with languid, gnomic dialogue about the nature of power relations, and exquisitely shot by Sorrentino’s regular cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi. What it lacks is the earlier film’s dynamism and montage sequences, instead featuring heavily the sumptuous panoramic shots accompanied by sacred music that weighed down his La grande bellezza (2013) so heavily (although a scene of nuns playing football in slow motion to the soundtrack of Schubert’s Ave Maria is just on the right side of self-importance). Unfortunately, the first episode also displays the tiresome gender politics that were on show in La grande bellezza and Youth (2015), with the first wistful flashback to naked breasts coming at approximately four minutes in. Even Diane Keaton in a central role as chief advisor and mother figure to the eponymous pope (Jude Law) is not enough to stop me from wishing, as always, that Sorrentino would just make films without women in them at all, and concentrate on what he does best, power relations between men, with the odd fast-paced montage. The cast is wonderful, though, with veteran Italian character actor Silvio Orlando stealing the show from Law. The Young Pope aired to initially excellent ratings, and although these have dropped off during the series’ run, a second season has already been commissioned; if the first series were to prove a hit in the US when it is broadcast in January, it would be fabulously stereotypical that Italy’s two current quality drama exports were about the Vatican and the mafia (Stefano Sollima’s critical and commercial hit, Gomorra la serie).
Catherine O'Rawe
Source: http://theplaylist.net/