Pao­lo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope pro­vides a test for mil­len­ni­al atheists

On 13 March, 2013 the Argen­tinean Jesuit and one time night­club bounc­er Jorge Mario Bergoglio was appoint­ed Pope, adopt­ing the name of Fran­cis as a ges­ture of com­pas­sion towards the poor. A people’s ruler – anti-con­sumerist, envi­ron­men­tal­ist and defend­er of refugees – his pub­lic state­ments have been wide­ly cel­e­brat­ed as a brave attempt to lib­er­alise the Vat­i­can for the 21^st century.

The Young Pope, the new series by Ital­ian direc­tor Pao­lo Sor­renti­no, inverts the Church’s recent turn towards inclu­siv­i­ty and social engage­ment, sub­sti­tut­ing the rel­a­tive­ly pro­gres­sive ener­gies of the cur­rent lead­er­ship with an apoc­a­lyp­tic ver­sion of doc­tri­naire Catholi­cism. His fic­tion­al pon­tiff, played by Jude Law, is the anti-Fran­cis, an arch-con­ser­v­a­tive serv­ing under the appro­pri­ate­ly aus­tere name Pius XIII.

The series opens with a dream in which the new Pope stands before a sun-drenched St Peter’s cel­e­brat­ing mas­tur­ba­tion, con­tra­cep­tives and gay mar­riage. ​“Absurd things!” he says on wak­ing, set­ting the tone for what is to come. His actu­al homi­ly, end­ing with a melo­dra­mat­ic crash of thun­der, is filled with fire and brim­stone, ​“God isn’t inter­est­ed in us until we become inter­est­ed in him exclu­sive­ly” he riles, ​“24 hours a day your hearts and minds filled only with God, there’s no room for any­thing else, no room for lib­er­ty, no room for emancipation!”

Law’s Pope is aggres­sive and social­ly awk­ward, a tem­pes­tu­ous ball of ner­vous ener­gy sur­round­ed by a guile­ful clique of crim­son robed car­di­nals. From his break­fast of cher­ry coke and insa­tiable smok­ing habit to his weak grasp of the Ital­ian lan­guage, Pius is an alien in the cor­ri­dors of the Vat­i­can, sus­tained by endor­phin hits and paral­ysed by para­noia. ​“Friend­ly rela­tion­ships are dan­ger­ous,” he warns, ​“they lend them­selves to ambi­gu­i­ties, mis­un­der­stand­ings and con­flicts and they always end bad­ly.” Only the Machi­avel­lian Car­di­nal Voiel­lo, a prag­mat­ic intel­lec­tu­al, dares to con­front the new Pope, qui­et­ly plot­ting a coup ​“to save the Moth­er Church” behind a well rehearsed guise of devotion.

The ensu­ing dra­ma, which fol­lows Voiello’s attempt to sab­o­tage Pius’s homo­sex­u­al witch-hunt, is struc­tured around a series of oppo­si­tions: Ital­ian ver­sus Amer­i­can, lib­er­al ver­sus con­ser­v­a­tive, his­to­ry ver­sus tech­nol­o­gy, dreams ver­sus real­i­ty. Each theme is rein­forced visu­al­ly through Luca Bigazzi’s mas­ter­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy, a long­time Sor­renti­no col­lab­o­ra­tor who also lensed 2013’s The Great Beau­ty. The devout gaze of pil­grims are inter­spersed with the tired eyes and yawns of jour­nal­ists and TV crews, kan­ga­roos run wild in Renais­sance gar­dens while Nuns play foot­ball and old men in crim­son robes tap fre­net­i­cal­ly at their iPads. The sound­track – a mix of trip-hop, synth-pop and tech­no – rein­forces these jux­ta­po­si­tions, wrap­ping the mag­is­te­r­i­al build­ings in a neon par­o­dy of postmodernism.

The result is a tight poet­ic sto­ry-world, well defined in its lim­its, its polem­i­cal log­ic and artis­tic mes­sage. This is a reflex­ive med­i­ta­tion on the mal­leabil­i­ty of sym­bols in the age of social media, and, as the title sug­gests, the dif­fi­cul­ty of com­mu­ni­cat­ing between gen­er­a­tions. ​“The church thinks in cen­turies” says one of the lawyers in 2015’s Catholic Church sex scan­dal dra­ma, Spot­light, ​“do you think your paper has the resources to take that on?” The Young Pope takes this dis­junc­tion of tem­po­ral­i­ties to its extreme. How, it asks, can an insti­tu­tion that thinks in such long arcs com­mu­ni­cate with today’s youth, who devour infor­ma­tion in microsec­onds, and have seem­ing­ly no capac­i­ty for memory?

The answer, which Pius deliv­ers in a lec­ture to his head of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, lies in mys­tery. ​“I do not have an image because I am no one” he declares, ​“they will not see any­thing of me, except for a dark shad­ow, my sil­hou­ette.” The Vat­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er is fired, mer­chan­dise halt­ed and orders giv­en to hide the Pope’s face dur­ing his speech­es. In a world obsessed with curat­ing images and gen­er­at­ing spec­ta­cle, Sor­renti­no sug­gests, it is pre­cise­ly the mys­tery of the Pope that sus­tains the pow­er of the Church. ​“The Vat­i­can sur­vives thanks to hyper­bole and we shall gen­er­ate hyper­bole. But this time in reverse” Pius con­cludes in a micro-man­i­festo of his grand plan.

For all its stylised visu­als and Far­go-esque humour, what real­ly dis­tin­guish­es Sor­renti­no as a direc­tor is his abil­i­ty to con­vey a con­vinc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive amidst the pow­er games. Ear­ly on we dis­cov­er that Pius, an orphan, does not believe in God. It is an unex­pect­ed rev­e­la­tion com­ing from such a severe char­ac­ter and packs a sur­pris­ing emo­tion­al punch. As the episodes progress we fol­low his pained rela­tion­ship with his for­mer men­tor, his adopt­ed moth­er and final­ly Esther, the show’s femme fatale, as he strug­gles with his cri­sis of faith. These moments of empa­thy give the show an impres­sive depth that anchors the satire and, more impor­tant­ly, stop it ever feel­ing cheap.