Vatican City politics make ordinary elections look tame by Richard Jones

A look at Conclave (PG)

With the death of an ailing Pope the in-house politics of jostling Roman Catholic Cardinals in this movie make ordinary politics look very tame.

This film starts with bedroom scenes of the dying Pope with the world’s leading Cardinals clustered around his bed.

The dead Pope’s body is wrapped up, placed on a trolley and taken by ambulance to the holy morgue.

And so the world needs a new Roman Catholic church leader.

Dean of the meetings of the world’s RC leaders is Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) who’s tasked with organising a Conclave of his peers to nominate – and eventually name – the next Pope.

There’s various factions among the Conclave. Of course there are ultra-Conservatives headed up by Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castelliti), moderates led by Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) and even the left-leaning group with Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) at the forefront.

Whilst all these pre-Conclave groupings and sects meet to discuss the candidate they’ll vote for we’re introduced to a relative newcomer: Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Dietz) from Afghanistan.

He’d been conscripted, in secret, by the late Pope to serve his Catholic community in the arch-diocese of Kabul.

The Pope’s intervention and eventual nomination of Benitez as a Cardinal seems to have saved his life.

And so the seemingly endless vote casting sessions of the Conclave get under way. Not one Cardinal receives a sufficient two-thirds majority vote to become the next Pope.

And so black smoke curls up the main Vatican chimney to alert the waiting crowd in St. Peter’s Square that no one has been elected yet.

They’re all waiting for the famous cloud of white smoke.

We see a succession of behind-the-scenes impromptu meetings of various Cardinals – in individual bedrooms off the main corridor, out the back of the big kitchen at the main dining room and even in comparatively open view among the Vatican’s cloisters.

The magic two-thirds majority at the Conclave seems a long way off.

Eventually we come to the concluding few minutes. The film’s final twist may seem a little far-fetched, but it’s unforgettable and probably caught all we regular cinema goers off guard and quite unprepared as the newly-elected Pope is revealed.

Three-and-a-half stars. The running time of two hours is perhaps a tad too long but the ending is superb.