CONCLAVE
**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Edward Berger
EMILIA PÉREZ
*/****
starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz
written and directed by Jacques Audiard
by Angelo Muredda Knives Out at the Vatican: That’s the basic elevator pitch for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which follows the politically loaded secret process to elect a new Pope following the death of his predecessor under shadowy circumstances. Adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, Berger’s follow-up to the very serious and very loud All Quiet on the Western Front promises a frothier, pulpier good time, and for a while, it delivers one, having some fun with its cloistered setting of hushed hallway meetings, its colourful cast of red-draped snippy cardinals, and its tight 72-hour timeframe, where anything seems possible. Before long, though, Conclave begins to sag under the weight of its pretension to justify the effortful production design (including an ambitiously but pointlessly recreated Sistine Chapel), overwrought musical and editing flourishes, and fraught setting, and to say something–anything, really–about current affairs: gender diversity in the Church, the war between nativism and pluralism, you name it.
The calm guiding force through this ultimately florid exercise in soapboxing and backroom dealing is the brow-furrowed Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes like a tired cop going back for one last job. He’s a man with a crisis of faith whom the ailing Holy Father tasks with staying in the Church just long enough to run the conclave to replace him because of his aptitude for middle management. Proving that backhanded compliment true, Lawrence makes a competent if opaquely motivated master of ceremonies, rushing from daily votes to clandestine conversations with progressive but timid candidate Bellini (Stanley Tucci, in a rare boring performance) to secret investigations of the potentially disqualifying affairs of leading contenders like the socially regressive Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and the corrupt Tremblay (John Lithgow, not looking like much of a Tremblay), and soul-testing exchanges with the severe Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) and the wildcard Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a gentle soul who comes from a hush-hush Papal appointment in Kabul. These interviews play out like speed dates, introducing us to the major players at a relatively fast clip.
So far, so good, but Conclave drops the ball in a series of clumsy late developments that turn the conclave into a referendum on the wider world outside the Cardinals’ front door, with no real thematic development to justify it. Not a subtle dramaturge, Berger cranks the score and the expressionistic camera angles up to 11 like he’s making a giallo, turning what ought to be sensitive revelations about characters’ private physical differences and positions on political violence–the stuff bad actors might turn sensationalist, but that real artists should know to handle with some grace–into sensationalist twists (which earned nasty guffaws from the festival audience at the first screening) and then tired, tacky position-paper speeches. It’s too bad, because the structuring conceit has some juice: who doesn’t want to know what goes on in a conclave, and who doesn’t hope it’s a bit shady?
After a brief sojourn in relatively minor, tasteful literary adaptations like The Sisters Brothers and Paris, 13th District, the Jacques Audiard who fed Marion Cotillard’s legs to an orca at Marineland in Rust and Bone is back in the enervating Emilia Pérez, a film so pointlessly, self-consciously extra only a festival audience could love it. A pop opera with weak songs about the irredeemable corruption of the Mexican legal system and the quirks of acquiring back-channel vaginoplasties and rhinoplasties in Bangkok (Audiard remains a little stinker in his seventies), this genre-defying crime melodrama musical nominally exists to be an actors’ showcase, even as it strands its cast with hackneyed characterizations and implausible reactions to improbable events that don’t develop so much as pile up.
Karla Sofía Gascón plays the eponymous heroine, a trans woman we meet pre-transition as drug kingpin Manitas Del Monte. While ruling her empire as Manitas, she forcefully recruits frustrated Mexico City defense attorney Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help her secure some top-shelf gender treatments from around the world to become her true self and safely relocate wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids until she’s ready to reunite with them. Used to saying yes to any number of violent gangsters and ruling-class scumbags, lest she get kidnapped or disappeared, Rita does what’s asked and is given wealth and a new life as a London socialite for her efforts. Her bubble is popped when Emilia, now comfortable in her own skin, resurfaces, dragging her, Jessi, and the children back to Mexico City under false pretenses. Emilia insists on playing house for her estranged family, passing herself off as Manitas’s long-lost and never-mentioned cousin and parenting her own kids from afar without letting them in on her secret identity à la Mrs. Doubtfire. When she’s not doing that, naturally, she’s using her enormous wealth–built on a life of violence and exploitation–to run an NGO that aids in recovering the remains of the cartels’ kidnapping victims, at least some of whom she buried in her previous life.
Audiard never really justifies his interest in Mexico as anything but a grab bag of sordid details he can appropriate for a little colour. He renders his setting almost totally anonymous and textureless, cobbling it out of recycled tropes from melodramas and crime thrillers past about drug wars, unsettled remains, toxic masculinity, and tough dames. His garish hard lighting and unflattering shadows make even the musical numbers where characters burst out of their surroundings to yearn or wail or reflect look like the stuff of a generic narco thriller; that’s the point, I guess, but so what? Why do they have to look ugly? The songs don’t help, with one number, in particular, sung by Emilia’s son as he realizes she reminds him of her dad, painting Emilia in the broadest strokes of what Mexican masculinity might look like to a French auteur: wouldn’t you know she smells like guacamole and spicy food and sweat?
The lone saving grace is Gascón, whose interpretation of Emilia as pinched and awkward in her earlier ill-fitting male vestments and steely and scary in her gender euphoria as a woman is interesting–the only take on a character here that feels fleshed out. Though she isn’t done any favours by dubious numbers where she moons about how she’s half-man and half-woman, half-kingpin and half-queen, she at least rides the waves of her inconsistent characterization better than her costars, who were generously awarded Best Actress with her at Cannes despite looking like caged animals in their respective numbers–in Gomez’s case, despite being an actual pop star in her day job. While it was a darling at Cannes and warmly received on the fall festival circuit for its supposed audaciousness in playing with so many ideas, Emilia Pérez doesn’t effectively subvert any of its several dozen tropes and motifs, instead just rolling around in them, waiting for your applause. Programme (both films): Special Presentations
