Women in the Conclave
Looking at gender in Edward Berger’s Conclave
(Spoilers ahead if you for some reason have not seen Conclave yet) (Literally go see it, it’s so good)
Conclave bravely proves that men can be bitches too, and very often are. The reason I wanted to see this movie in the first place (besides Stanley Tucci) was a tweet that remarked that Conclave is like if an episode of Gossip Girl was filmed at the Vatican - which is a very poignant summary of the movie. These men of God are motivated by political power and ego, which they have found religious excuses for. The vaping Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is a primary example: he wants an Italian in power and he wants a traditionalist in power, but mostly he wants it to be him. But even the Cardinals that are painted as good are driven by ego - even Stanley Tucci.
If you strip away all the sinning and conniving, the major conflict in Conclave is the battling opinions of which way the church should behave moving forward - it is a question of traditionalism versus progressivism. Of course, this includes the role of women in the church - women are not allowed to be priests in Catholicism, meaning they are shut out from all high ranking positions in the church. During a strategy meeting Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), the most progressive Cardinal in the running for Pope and the fan favorite of protagonist Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), shares his platform: he’s pro-gay marriage, pro-birth control, pro-tolerance to differing views within the church, pro-women playing more of a role in the curia. At the end of this speech another Cardinal says, “let’s not bring up women.”
So how do you solve a problem like Maria? Well, you ignore it, as it is politically unpopular amongst even the most progressive of Cardinals.
The female cast of Conclave is seen but not heard - in fact Isabella Rossellini’s Sister Agnes is the only female character that has distinct lines, and she doesn’t speak until 59 minutes into the movie - almost exactly halfway through. And yet there are women present, the nuns are the gears that keep the machine of the Conclave working - they are seen cooking and cleaning and providing other sorts of support to the male Cardinals as they select a new pope. They are not, crucially, allowed in the room where the voting for the new pope takes place, they are seen only in the domestic spaces of the film: bedrooms, kitchens, dining areas. The majority of shots the nuns are featured in show them hovering in the background or show only the backs of their habits, very few moments are spent actually focusing on their faces.
Nuns are not especially powerful in the Catholic Church, except in the case of traumatizing Catholic school children, but we see nuns bring the cardinals to their knees politically twice in the film. The first is when Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucien Msamati), a frontrunner for Cardinal, is cast out of the lead when it becomes clear from a public outburst that he has had some sort of romantic entanglement with a nun. He goes from Pope to nope over the course of a single, dramatic interaction. The nun in question does not even have any audible lines in the movie, her presence alone is powerful enough to upset Adeyemi. It is not her actions, but rather his relationship with her and his inability to control himself around her, that cause his ruin.
The second occasion is when Sister Agnes exposes how exactly that other nun ended up at the Conclave in the first place: in a rare moment of the Cardinals paying attention to a woman, she uncovers that the woman was flown in by Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) in an attempt to undermine Adeyemi and secure votes for himself. Rossellini has so few lines in the film but her performance is truly arresting - she clearly runs shit and every line and suspicious facial expression are delivered with incredible power.
But the thing that flips all the church’s gender roles on their head is the twist ending: shortly after being chosen, the elected pope Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), reveals himself to be intersex. He has a uterus, and therefore, he says, would be considered biologically female. None of the Cardinals know this, of course, and in fact Benitez didn’t even know it until he was opened up for surgery a few years prior. It is a rare and surprising moment of intersex representation meant to make you and Cardinal Lawrence question your preconceived ideas of gender presentation. While the Cardinals are preoccupied with infighting and ignoring women all together, they are missing the fact that the gender and sexual binaries that so much of the world is based on are completely unnatural. Benitez shares that he refused to get surgery to remove the uterus because God made him the way he is, and he doesn’t feel the need to change that to fit into an imaginary binary.
It is a very timely reminder that you have no idea what someone’s sexual characteristics are unless you literally cut them open to check. And if you have to work that hard to find out what someone is, does it really matter? And if the lines are so blurred, how can you have a religious hierarchy that relies so heavily on them?
The final shot of the film is a trio of giggling nuns leaving the conclave, shown from Cardinal Lawrence’s perspective. The image is light and airy after a full movie shut into the conclave. It is also the only time in the movie that one of the Cardinals simply observes women, rather than needing some thing or piece of information from them. After two hours of watching men fight among themselves for what they believe is their rightful place in power, we’re left with the image of women from a distance. These women, just like the men, have devoted their lives to the church and yet they expect and receive no power from doing so. But finally at the end of it all, they are both seen and heard, even if just by one Cardinal.
