Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
These are a few of his fav-our-ite films … Pope Leo’s that is. This white-bread movie playlist has been released in advance of His Holiness’s “meeting with the world of cinema” on Saturday, part of a longstanding Vatican policy of engaging with creatives.
The pope has, according to a Vatican statement “expressed his desire to deepen the dialogue with the world of cinema, and in particular with actors and directors, exploring the possibilities that artistic creativity offers to the mission of the Church and the promotion of human values.” The pope will chat with movie notables including Cate Blanchett, Spike Lee, George Miller, Gus Van Sant and Giuseppe Tornatore.
His selection of films looks, at first glance, very trad compared to his predecessor Francis’s picks, which included Rossellini’s Rome Open City, Visconti’s The Leopard and Fellini’s La Strada.
No doubt about it. Francis was a Letterboxd film bro. Leo is a bit uncool by comparison. But at least he hasn’t chosen anything biblical, such as say Mel Gibson’s worrying The Passion of the Christ – that one was enjoyed by the late John Paul II who is said to have murmured, after the house lights had gone up: “It is as it was …”
But let’s have a look at this list of Leo’s filmic faves … which ends on a disturbing note.
First, The Sound off Music. Leo loves it. Fine. We all love it. Perhaps, as Catholic leader, he savoured the historical paradox in that film: Austrian nuns who were anti-Nazi? Wow. Interesting. Then there’s Capra’s adored classic It’s a Wonderful Life about James Stewart coming to see how he’s made a difference to the lives of people in his little home town Bedford Falls.
Capra was a Catholic and the town’s main church is the St Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Redford’s heart-wrenching Ordinary People is pretty secular but it’s all about family values.
But then there’s the overbearingly sugary Life Is Beautiful by the exuberant comic actor and film-maker Roberto Benigni. Benigni plays an Italian Jew who in 1944 is thrown into a Nazi death camp with his son and with many impish tricks and impostures tries to conceal from the boy what his happening, pretending it is all a game. There is something enduringly grating and jarring and existentially dishonest about the film’s attempt at applying emollient sentimental comedy to the Holocaust.
Given the Roman Catholic church’s troubled relationship with the Nazi regime, I really wish the pope had chosen something else.
Sister Bridget, the terrifying mother superior played by Geraldine McEwan in Peter Mullan’s searing drama The Magdalene Sisters, is a huge fan of the sweet natured Catholic comedy The Bells of St Mary’s, starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. Perhaps His Holiness could give that a watch?
