Gianfranco Rosi’s documentaries often focus on individuals at different junctures in the process of traumatic recovery. Now, In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis notably flips that playbook, highlighting Pope Francis’s visits to numerous countries—many of them war-torn or afflicted by ongoing catastrophes—over a nine-year span.
Rosi draws from both archival footage and shots/scenes from his own films to portray Francis as devoted to sermonizing on human resilience and religious harmony, even as the pope travels by private jet and remains, aside from his brief appearances, at a remove from the specific circumstances for which he aims to impart wisdom and hope. The film is without narration, and there are no talking heads, so what emerges in Rosi’s feature-length montage of the pope’s travels and monologues is a compelling, if muddled, presentation of his abstract and synecdochic power intersecting with tangible pain and poverty on the ground.
Because Rosi relies heavily on editing and sound mixing to create implicit commentary on the pope’s words and actions, In Viaggio becomes stylistically redundant, though by design, with each visit to another country unfolding in a similar manner. The film opens with Francis visiting Lampedusa in 2013 (with footage surrounding the pope’s visit drawn from Rosi’s remarkable 2016 documentary Fire at Sea) to console residents over the recent deaths of African refugees aboard boats that became “vehicles of death.” As Francis arrives, residents line the streets and wave to him as if they were attending a parade. The point, Rosi implies, is how the spectacle of religious celebrity momentarily overshadows the urgency of human loss.
This cycle repeats anywhere the pope goes. During a 2015 visit to Washington, D.C., where Francis delivered the first papal speech before Congress, congressional members clap and smile in a manner similar to the people of Lampedusa, all before he takes the podium to speak about the arms trade and gun violence. By pinpointing this pattern of behavior regardless of location, Rosi makes a convincing case for the pope’s paradoxically enriching and vacuous aura.
As presented in the film, Francis’s rhetoric surrounding human-made disaster and discrimination doesn’t result in any discernible change or the progress of peace. Rather, horrible events and scenarios persist, creating more occasions for the pope to tread the same ceremonial terrain, where he’s roundly beloved and speaks wisely in the name of religious solace.
In Viaggio is an ambiguous portrait of numerous points in time connected by one man’s presence (the film jumbles the chronology of the trips), and Rosi often juxtaposes shots for their difference in sound. For one, during Francis’s 2013 visit to Brazil, shots of heavily armed guards standing silently on the outskirts of the event contrast with images of the crowd’s roar at the sight of the pope. The precise significance of this shot construction eludes definite meaning, as has often been Rosi’s preferred practice, from Below Sea Level to Sacro GRA.
Still, In Viaggio unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles. If repetition is the film’s point—that the pope’s role in global society has become itself redundant—then that point is abundantly clear around the halfway mark. While no one would mistake the film for being either hagiographic or an outright critique of Francis and the Catholic Church, Rosi has swung the pendulum too far away from a definite take on the material, leaving the filmmaker’s typically precise instincts wanting for a more exacting and revelatory method.
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