sleepymarmot

[sleepymarmot]

I finally finished Conclave and I am livid, I am mad at all of those people who described this movie as dumb, convoluted or disappointing because of the final reveal.

When I first heard of Conclave, I mainly heard complaints about how the movie believed itself to be too smart, was too ambitious and ended collapsing onto itself. I was busy with other things at the time, so I didn't look too much into it, but I still got bombarded by youtube reviews that were like "Here's what went wrong with Conclave" and "When Dumb Tries To Play Smart" and "Conclave: Is That It?". Then I found one too many fire edits about it on TikTok, saw the fandom was cool, and decided I would have watched the movie, even though I genuinely feared I wouldn't have liked as much as the other fans did.

And boy was I wrong. I loved this movie. I loved it. And I am so angry now that I have finished it because the people who said it wasn't good (specifically because of the finale) didn't just have a different opinion, but they were dead wrong. They didn't understand the point of the movie, I think, and, as someone who loves cinema, there's nothing I hate more than going "I will now explain the film to you" but I have to get this thing off my chest.

The people who thought that Conclave final reveal about Benitez being intersex was disappointing are the same fucking people who thought The Last Duel finale was disappointing. And spoiler for The Last Duel, but I have to draw the comparison.

If you haven't watched The Last Duel, it's a movie by Ridley Scott that supposedly tells the story of the last duel ever held in Europe. The movie is basically structured like Rashomon, which, if you haven't also watched, it's a movie by Akira Kurosawa that tells the same story from different points of views. In The Last Duel, the story is that of a married woman who is raped by man (and the whole thing is supposed to be "resolved" thorugh a duel). You get the husband's version of the story, who thinks the man who assaulted his wife only did so to spite him, the version of the rapist, who swears the woman was in love with him and just claimed it was rape to defend her honour, and then, finally, you get the version of the woman.

And guess what, the woman wasn't in love with the guy who assaulted her, and because The Last Duel tries to be "feminism baby steps for misogynists", you see how she's treated far more harshly that the man who assaulted her and you finish the movie thinking "oh dang it we should probably believe victims of assault and not treat them as bad if not worse than people who assault them".

Sadly, a scary percentage of people finished the movie and went online to say "It would have been a cooler twist if she was actually an evil mastermind all along and had seduced that guy" and at the time I wanted to grab these people by the collar and shout "THAT'S NOT THE POINT".

Because the point of the movie was not having a fucking twist, but crafting a story with a coherent narrative and ending.

And now I see this shit happening again with Conclave in some online circles (luckily not Tumblr, yet). I heard somebody whose opinion I previously respected say that "it would have been a cooler twist if Benitez had actually killed the previous pope".

*takes a huge breath* JESUS CHRIST THE TWIST IS NOT THE POINT. The point, I personally believe, was to show that in our current Catholic Church (which I had the disgrace to grow up in) being intersex- which is not an action, it's not something you do, it's something you just are, it's something that you can't help- is seen on the same level as rape, simony and corruption, which arr very intentional crimes. Hell, an openly racist and xenophobic candidate like Tedesco has a cleaner reputation than Benitez, who just so happen to have been born with a uterus, in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

That's the fucking point. The point is that a Church who sees God as a perfect creator would hypocritically cast a man aside because of the way that creator made him. So, which is it? Is God infallible or can he make mistakes, when it's about the poeple you chose to ostracize from Christianity? And of course you can extend this sentiment to many other categories, especially LGBQTIA+, which the Catholic Church deems unnatural for arbitrary reasons, if we are to believe they are a creation of the same perfect God the Catholic Church revers.

And I don't think I am some kind of genius to having understood that, it's not some hidden subtext that I just explained, this is the text. This is what the movie is about. You get the explaination at the end of the movie, like you were a 5-year-old. You get the "I am what God made me" speech (which made me bawl my eyes out).

So I am pretty fucking mad at everybody who said this movie was dumb because of the "final twist", because the finale wasn't Raymond O'Malley running to Thomas Lawrence with "Your Eminence, results from the morgue are in, it was revelaed that the Pope's death, it wasn't a heart attack...it was poison" and then there's a cut to Benitez's smiling maliciously. That would be shit. That would be utter shit and would make no narrative sense for the story Berger was trying to tell.

I have a shit relationship with the Catholic Chruch, okay? The first music CD I have ever bought in my life was "Il sogno eretico" by Caparezza (if you know you know), I refused to enter churches for a good while, I made my religion teacher cry, to my parent's annoyance I keep referring to elements from Christianity as "judeo-christian mythology". If I could wish the Catholic Church to disappear tomorrow, I fucking would.

So I can sort of understand if some people wished for Benitez to have done something terrible as a way to reflect that "the Church sucks there is no such a thing as a good cop pope". Maybe you have that hatred in your heart for Catholicism and the inherently fascist Vatican State and you wanted the movie to give the Catholic Church no redemption at all.

But that's not the story Berger wanted to tell and you have to respect it, especially because I think the story he told with Conclave is a beautiful, harsh, clever and emotional story, which carries message of hope and of singular importance.

I said that if I could wish the Catholic Church away I would, but I can't. It has survived nearly 2000 years, during which states have fallen, new religions have risen and she's still there, like rust, like mold. One cannot simply get rid of the Catholic Church, so one can only hope for it to be better, and a character such as Vincent Benitez, who lives between certainties, perfectly encapsulate that hope. Even for an anti-religious heretic as I am.

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Not me scrolling through the Conclave tag only to see no one talk about the deliberate positioning and framing of the women in this movie.

Pulling up this movie I completely expected to only encounter Sister Agnes as the one woman we see in the trailer, the conclave a space that has been kept from the female members of the church. Now, color me surprised when I started the movie and most of the establishing shots we got were focused on all the women working in the Vatican.

And it is such a deliberate choice, it does the film a disservice not to talk about it.

Because while Cardinal Lawrence is having his fifteenth breakdown during sequestering and Bellini finds the ambitious asshole within himself, Ray does all the leg work, and Bel---- we see the women work.

We see the kitchens, we see them cook, we see them stand aside. Most of the time when the Cardinals are conspiring it is the women who interrupt because they are busy working, walking, running errands.

And there is power in that.

I think it is very deliberate how often (and with such lingering gaze) the camera shows us the lives of the other half - partially to connect to the wider themes of the movie, on how Bellini asks for women to get more power but never thanks them, and how Benitez stumps them all by thanking the women preparing their meals when asked to say the prayer (considering his own probably tumultuous relationship to gender within the church).

But it also stands in direct opposition to a long tradition in story telling: servants don't exist. How often the heroes of a regency romance are "alone" because the two hand maidens and three maids don't really count.

Conclave doesn't do that.

It doesn't let us look away.

Between all the petty drama, the politics, and the real life consequences of the conclave, we never stop looking at the people doing all the work.

Yes, we follow the ups and downs of Lawrence and Co, but in doing so the movie reminds us again and again of the women working the kitchen.

And that was just such a powerful artistic choice in a movie about a famously misogynistic church... I loved it. And I had to talk about it.

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Shades of Blue

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revelation

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"(...) I was mistaken. I was who I had always been."

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the blazing sun, the unbroken circle

[ Image description: the first image is an horizontal painting of Vincent Benítez from Conclave. He is looking to side with a neutral expression, hair in the wind and wearing a dark blue turtleneck. In profile, he is encircled by a purple halo and surrounded by a bright yellow field that blends to orange at the edges of the paper. The second image is a closeup of his profile. End of ID. ]

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Among a Sea of Holy Men (prints available here)

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Mexican man SHOCKS papal conclave by ordering in the perfect light of god’s grace and mercy

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I’m sorry hold on this shit is messing me up wait look:

Retired butcher. Fine. Sure. Whatever. Sergio does naturally look like a retired butcher with appropriate costuming.

But then:

?????

??????????

Rossini! Rossini! was released in 1991. Conclave novel was published in 2016. Sergio Castellitto was cast as Cardinal Tedesco in like… mid to late 2022. (???)

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Welcome to another episode of, "Am I an obsessed Conclave fan or am I just a bio student researching a bird species?"

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Finished this on my daily train commute, train was fully packed, didn’t care anymore , be cringe, be free. I love my shaylas😔🫶🫶🫶

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Finally got a comm done and its Lawrenitez <3

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Portrait of Cardinal Benítez, the future Pope Innocent XIV

I keep forgetting to post my piece for the Conclave zine but here it is <3

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madonna and child // the lamb of god

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small study i did a few months back when i first watched conclave :3 may do some others in the future, i think my abilities are a lot more developed now

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Eligo in Summum Pontificem

details under cut