When
the Italian actor-director Nanni Moretti’s new film We Have a Pope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year,
some critics were perplexed. Moretti, an outspoken leftist and a longtime
atheist, had skewered religious piety in The
Mass is Ended (1985) and had not long ago made some waves with his
incendiary satire of Silvio Berlusconi, The
Caiman (2006). But We Have a Pope
was a seemingly gentler film – a comic drama of a newly elected Pope (Michel
Piccoli) who, suffering an existential crisis, flees the Vatican and wanders
among the people of Rome, visiting with a psychotherapist and reliving his
youthful dreams of becoming an actor. And yet it contained a subtler, more
humanist critique of the Papacy, underlining the tension between the power of
the office and the messy, all-too-human thoughts and needs of the people who
inhabit it. But this sort of humanism has always been the hallmark of Moretti ,
an iconic figure in Italy and Europe who isn’t particularly well known in the
U.S. (Although his 1993 film Caro Diario
[Dear Diary], was a small arthouse hit.) I sat down with him during a
recent visit to New York, to talk about his new film, crossing Silvio
Berlusconi, making political movies, and much more.
