Notre Dame Des Victoires

I saw the film 1917 on the vigil of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and I think there’s a connection between the movie and the liturgical celebration. Bear with me. First, as everyone who has seen it remarks, the editing and cinematography of 1917 are so astounding that it appears to unfold completely in real time, the result of one continuous shot. Think of the famous scene from Scorsese’s Goodfellas, in which Ray Liotta and his date walk into the night club—but now stretched out for two hours. What this produces in the viewer is an almost unprecedented sense of being there, experiencing the events with the characters in the film. And to be inserted into the First World War is, to put it mildly, horrific. Obviously, all wars are terrible, but there was just something uniquely appalling about World War I: the oppressiveness of the trenches,…

Vi la película 1917 la vigilia de la fiesta del Bautismo del Señor, y creo que hay una conexión entre la película y la celebración litúrgica. Tengan paciencia. En primer lugar, como comentan todos los que lo han visto, el montaje y la cinematografía de 1917 son tan sorprendentes que parece desarrollarse completamente en tiempo real, el resultado de una toma continua. Piensen en la famosa escena de la película Goodfellas (Uno de los nuestros en España y Buenos muchachos en Hispanoamérica), donde Ray Liotta y la chica con la que tenía una cita entran en el club nocturno, pero estirada durante dos horas. Lo que esto produce en el espectador es una sensación casi inédita de estar allí, experimentando los acontecimientos con los personajes de la película. Y ser insertados en la Primera Guerra Mundial es, por decirlo suavemente, horroroso. Obviamente, todas las guerras son terribles, pero hubo algo…

The new and much-ballyhooed Netflix film The Two Popes should, by rights, be called The One Pope, for it presents a fairly nuanced, textured, and sympathetic portrait of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) and a complete caricature of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). This imbalance fatally undermines the movie, whose purpose, it seems, is to show that old grumpy, legalistic Benedict finds his spiritual bearings through the ministrations of friendly, forward-looking Francis. But such a thematic trajectory ultimately does violence to both figures, and turns what could have been a supremely interesting character study into a predictable and tedious apologia for the filmmaker’s preferred version of Catholicism. That we are dealing with a caricature of Ratzinger becomes clear when, in the opening minutes of the film, the Bavarian Cardinal is presented as ambitiously plotting to secure his election as Pope in 2005. On at least three occasions, the real Cardinal…