Isabella Rossellini attends a gala for Conclave during the 68th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall in London, on Oct. 10.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini, born June 18, 1952, may be the most interesting woman in the world. Born in Rome to legends – the actor Ingrid Bergman and the director Roberto Rossellini – she’s modelled for Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz and Madonna; made films with David Lynch, Guy Maddin and Denis Villeneuve; played herself on Friends and Los Espookys; had relationships with Martin Scorsese, Gary Oldman and Lynch; studied animal behaviour at Hunter College in New York; created the series Green Porno, where she dressed up as animals and insects and explained how each had sex; was fired at 43 as the face of Lancôme Cosmetics for being too old; was rehired 20 years later when they realized they’d been idiots; is an organic farmer in Bellport, N.Y.; helps train guide dogs for the blind; and retains possession of one of humankind’s most glorious faces.
When we met at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, her hair was short and chic, she wore a fascinating printed coat and so serenely yet regally did she sit, so full of mischief was her voice, that the four walls of the windowless interview room seemed to fall away, and I felt bathed in light.
We, along with her director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), were there to talk about Conclave, their new film, based on Robert Harris’s thriller of the same name. The pope has died, and the College of Cardinals has been summoned by its dean, the grave and thoughtful Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes, never better), to select a new one. Candidates include the progressive American, Bellini (Stanley Tucci); the sensible Canadian, Tremblay (John Lithgow) and the conservative Italian, Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto).
It’s the kind of movie they don’t make ‘em like any more: Mount Olympus acting, painterly light, gaspy plot twists. Every pope-wannabe represents a point of view in modern religious and cultural debate, and is also harbouring a juicy secret. As one says, “The men who are dangerous are the ones who want it.”
Berger adds lovely touches that prove God really is in the details: the coffer in which the Cardinals secure the late Pope’s ring, and the red ribbons that tie off his room; the cigarette butts that litter the flagstones after the Cardinals are sealed into the Vatican to deliberate; the way their old ballots are lanced with a spike and then burned. (Harris’s novel brims with research.) Castellitto makes comic hay with a vape pen. And screenwriter Peter Straughan gives Fiennes a thumpingly good, mid-movie, applause-worthy speech, about how certainty is the enemy of tolerance, which he nails.
“That speech is the reason I made the movie, and the reason Ralph made the movie,” Berger says. “We shot it simply – start from a mid-shot, push in to a closeup – six times, start to finish. It’s the speech that gives this story meaning, so you have to hope that the love we feel as we are making it goes through the camera onto the film and somehow ends up with you in the audience.”
There’s no way the filmmakers could have predicted that Conclave, which opened in select cities Oct. 25, would arrive on the eve of the contentious U.S. presidential election. But it’s impossible not to hear Fiennes’s speech, as well as many other lines, as warnings (“This is a war, commit to a side,” a cardinal thunders), and impossible not to see parallels in the vying candidates: the conservative who wants the church to go backward, to “a better time,” versus the progressive who wants more inclusiveness. One character even says, “I feel like I’m at an American political convention.”
Rossellini plays Sister Agnes, the head of the nuns who serve the Cardinals, saying little but seeing all. “She took the vow of being invisible, as she describes herself,” the actor says. “Nevertheless, God gave her eyes and ears, and she certainly uses them. My performance is really to listen, and to try to play the wisdom of silence. In fact, the movie is a celebration of the wisdom of doubt.”
“I knew I wanted to film Sister Agnes just listening, so I needed an actor with incredible charisma, an aura, an authority,” Berger says. “Only this iconic person came to mind.”
But what’s in it for Rossellini, who has so much to say about so many things, to play a character who’s mostly silent? “Acting is not words, we know that very well,” she replies. “When a script is written as beautifully as this, the words are part of the emotion, and they help with the emotion. But I’m a student of animal behaviour; I studied Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. I created a monologue that I perform, “Darwin’s Smile,” where I combine acting – which is the expression of emotions – with science.”
At one point in the monologue, she repeats the same sentence – “I love you and I want to be with you all my life” – in a myriad of ways. “I say it with love,” Rossellini says. “Then I say it again, but with hatred, so what it really means is, ‘I don’t want to see you one second more.’ Then I say it as if the person I’m speaking to is dead – ‘I wish I had been with you all my life.’ So it isn’t the words that show emotions, and you don’t need words to convey emotion. When you truly listen, your face, your breath reacts.”
Because they had fewer scenes, Tucci, Lithgow and Rossellini hung out a bit together during Conclave’s shoot in Rome. As befitting the world’s most interesting woman, she took them to a little-known restaurant near the Vatican, L’Eau Vive, which her mother used to frequent to avoid paparazzi. “It’s mostly for Cardinals and guests of the Vatican, but anyone can go,” she says. “It’s on a second floor, so it’s very discreet. Nuns cook the food, serve it, and then they sing in choir. My mama went there because people didn’t bother her. One nun said to her once, ‘You’re an actress, how nice.’ John, Stanley and I spent the whole night giggling.”
Surely the nuns must have recognized Rossellini? “They didn’t!” she insists. “But they probably recognized that we were not from the Vatican.”
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