The Audience

A man called Amedeo comes to Rome wanting a private audience with the Pope. He will not tell anyone what he has to say, repeating only that it has to be said to the Pope himself. He applies to get through the Vatican door, writes petitions, looks for someone to intercede, waits. At every step another official appears and each one sends him on to the next. The man disappears into a wait that stretches across years. Marco Ferreri's film takes Vatican bureaucracy not as a criticism of religion but as the working of an institution: files, appointments, courtesy and an answer that never comes. The man Enzo Jannacci plays is not mad, only insistent; the insistence itself takes him to madness. The cast includes Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Cuny. The film caused argument in Italy and is among the coldest of Ferreri's looks at institutions.