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Four out of Five stars
Running time: 104 mins

Characters grappling with life-changing crises are a regular fixture on the big screen – but what if the elderly man in question has just been elected as Pope and is having second thoughts? For his latest comedy, Italian director Nanni Moretti recreates the Vatican City and ponders, what if ...

What’s it all about?
As the conclave of Catholic cardinals gather to elect a new Pope, journalists postulate on who might be chosen, the crowd in St. Peter’s Square prays and the world waits for the white smoke – the signal that a decision has been made. It is an outsider though – one Cardinal Melville (Michel Piccoli) – who is picked, but just as he is about to greet the crowds on the balcony, he suffers a panic attack. The Vatican is then placed in a tricky position having a Pope who doesn’t want to be Pope and the world outside clamouring to know his identity. As a psychoanalyst (played Moretti himself) is brought in, the Pope-elect escapes and wanders the streets of Rome, trying to come to terms with his new role.

The Good
Nanni Moretti’s latest certainly isn’t the film you’d expect from a director whose last effort was the Berlusconi-skewering exercise that was The Caiman. Here, he aims to highlight the absurd rather than resorting to ridicule, playing up the bizarre nature of the rituals and pomp of the Vatican, showing it as a highly peculiar and isolated place.

The production design is especially impressive. The Vatican City, from its pruned hedges to ornate armory room, has been recreated with the upmost care and detail. However, the heart and soul of the film is Michel Piccoli’s bewildered and overwhelmed Pope. Pitching him as an existentialist fugitive who drifts round department stores and into bars trying to reconnect with the world again, Piccoli’s performance takes the film to a very sombre place.

The Bad
Moretti manages to pull off some incredibly bizarre moments: an utterly bonkers volley-ball tournament featuring all the elderly cardinals in particular takes this film far beyond Peter Morgan light-satire territory. However, not all of the wackiness works and sometimes the tone of the film seems uneven, lurching as it does between absurdity and melancholy.

Worth Seeing?
We Have a Poper is many things: a rather curious tragi-comedy, a revealing satire of the eccentric nature of the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, but most importantly, it’s a sympathetic portrait an elderly man’s crisis of confidence.