16.05.2011
Moretti mines his own life for Cannes papal drama
Moretti is both a confirmed atheist and a confident, critically lauded filmmaker. And yet he says the film is — like all his movies — autobiographical.
"Even if they don't speak about my life, they represent what I am at that moment," Moretti said during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival. "They always reflect a feeling that I have at that moment, a feeling that grows and leads to a story and characters."
In the case of "Habemus Papam" — Latin for "We Have a Pope," the expression with which the election of a pontiff is announced — that feeling was "a sense of inadequacy ... the desire to be somewhere else, the difficulty you have in playing the role for which you have been chosen, or which you have chosen yourself."
It's a feeling many viewers will recognize — but a bold stroke to invest that anxiety in the pontiff-elect, a man the faithful believe has been chosen by God to lead the church.
The on-screen pope, played by 85-year-old French actor Michel Piccoli, rushes away from the Vatican balcony where he is due to bless the crowds gathered below. Resisting the ministrations of a psychoanalyst played by Moretti, he escapes and wanders the streets of Rome, meeting with ordinary people and reassessing his life.
His abandoned fellow cardinals, stranded in the Vatican, struggle to pass the time until Moretti's character organizes a clerical volleyball tournament.
Moretti said he wanted to humanize these remote and mysterious church figures, seen at the film's start marching through the Vatican in crimson-robed glory, but soon revealed to be every bit as frail and human as anyone in the audience.
"The pope is shown as a man," Moretti said. "Even though he is considered the incarnation of God on Earth, he is a man, and a man who is able to say no. I also wanted to make the cardinals more human — these little children who are stuck in the conclave."
The film, one of 20 competing for the top prize at this year's festival, has already opened in Italy to a mix of praise, disappointment and relief.
The relief came from the church, which had feared Moretti, who sent up scandal-magnet Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi in "Il Caimano" ("The Cayman"), might wield his satirical scalpel. The disappointment came from secularists, sorry he wasn't more savage about a church that has been tarnished by revelations of clerical sex abuse and a money-laundering investigation into the Vatican bank.
"These people would like to know from my movie something that they already know," Moretti said. "They would like to see something they have already seen and be told a story they have read already in the newspapers and seen on TV. I preferred to make a movie that was about the questions.
"When I make a movie I don't think about the audience, about any particular audience — believers or psychoanalysts or the right wing or the left wing," he said. "I do what I want to do."
Moretti is clearly a director with confidence in his own imagination. The film's sumptuously detailed behind-the-scenes depiction of the Vatican took less research than one might think.
"I invented it," said the Italian director. "That's my job. I did see documentaries that inspired me for the procession when you see all the cardinals going to the Sistine Chapel. The rest was invented."
It convinces in part because few have seen behind the Vatican's closed doors. In the age of the Internet, Moretti wonders how long that mystery will remain intact.
"Maybe you'll have webcams inside the Sistine Chapel next time," he said.
The 57-year-old Moretti is a Cannes favorite, and won the top trophy, the Palme d'Or, a decade ago with his story of family loss "The Son's Room."
But he does not radiate delight as he sits fidgeting on a hotel balcony high above the teeming Croisette, Cannes' seafront boulevard.
"I'm not a great traveler," Moretti said. "And going to Cannes is not traveling. It's craziness."
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Part of unfinished Cather novel added to archives
Andrew Jewell, editor of the archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said when Cather died in 1947 the novel was not finished, and scholars believed the incomplete manuscript had been destroyed. An extensive collection left to the university by the author's nephew, Charles Cather, proves otherwise.
"For some reason, the story goes that she burned everything or (her partner) Edith Lewis burned everything," Jewell said. "That simply was not true."
Jewell described the passage, in Cather's hard-to-discern handwriting, as a conversation between a boy named Andre who had his tongue ripped out for the crime of blasphemy and a young, blind priest who gives the boy absolution. The scene takes place in medieval times in Avignon, France. At one point, the priest tells the boy to stop trying to talk or else he'll start to bleed again.
"She was aware of the historic language they would use. ... She has a feeling of the priest being so distraught," Jewell explained.
The passage was among the manuscripts, notebooks, photographs and letters kept by Charles Cather, who died in March and left the items to the archive. The collection includes a first-edition copy of Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about World War I, "One of Ours," that she gifted to her mother. It was still wrapped in gold paper and bears the inscription: "To my darling mother, I send the book of my heart." It's dated Sept. 20, 1922.
Cather, whose work was influenced by her life in Nebraska and Virginia as well as her travels, is best known for writing "O Pioneers," "My Antonia" and "Death Comes for the Archbishop."
With Charles Cather's gift, the UNL archive is home to 15 collections of the author's work, including many owned by her relatives. The newest items can be viewed at the archive, and a special event is planned to showcase them in the fall.
Guy Reynolds, director of the university's Cather Project, said the items, valued at $2 million, will provide new insight into Cather's life, work and career.
"It's like you take a snapshot of someone's office when they pass away, and suddenly those items are transported to another time and place," he said.
Cather was born in 1873. She moved to the Red Cloud area of Nebraska in 1883, and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1895.
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Loew hints again Ballack's Germany days are over
Ballack, 34, has not played for Germany since March 2010 after suffering back-to-back injuries last year.
With Germany top of their Euro 2012 qualifying group, Loew has repeatedly said he will not select Ballack again for the national side until his former captain is regularly impressing in the Bundesliga.
A crop of talented midfielders like Dortmund's Mario Goetze, Bayern Munich's Bastian Schweinsteiger and Real Madrid's Sami Khedira have forced their way into the side with consistent form while Ballack has been far from impressive.
He has struggled to win a place in the Bayer Leverkusen team this season and in his absence Germany finished third at the 2010 World Cup with their young side using their midfield pace to play some attractive football.
"As a coach, my duty is to reflect on what our selections might look like in one, two or three years time, in addition to guaranteeing immediate success," Loew told the weekly German magazine Focus, set to be published here on Monday.
"Michael knows what I think of his situation."
Ballack has been left out of the squad to face Uruguay in a friendly at the end of May, as well as Euro 2012 qualifiers against Austria and Azerbaijan in early June.
Loew says he met Ballack in March, without revealing the details of the conversation, but pundits and the press here seem to think the ex-Chelsea star will win his 99th -- and final -- cap in the friendly with Brazil in August.
After suffering an ankle injury in May 2010, Ballack picked up a knee injury in September after only three games back and has only played 17 league games this season.
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