A controversial Popess

This Chinese New Year is one of the best I have had for years. Instead of staying home to read and listen to music in a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement, I went on a hike to two of the most beautiful beaches in the whole of Hong Kong, Ham Tin Wan and Tai Long Sai Wan and yesterday, I went to see a controversial but excellent film, Pope Joan. It was controversial because even today, there are still arguments from the Vatican and elsewhere whether such a female pope, something unheard of and totallay unacceptable in the ecclesiastical hierarchy  actually existed because it was claimed that there were no  records of her ever having been Pope from AD 853-855 in official church history and many argued that she was merely a legend and there were different versions of such a "legend", the first time it appeared in print was in the 13th century..

The film is a joint German, Italian and Spanish production starrring Johanna Wolaklek, David Wenham and John Goodman, screen play adapted by Heinrich Hadding and directed by Sönke Wortmann, with excellent acting, a gripping script, full of drama, spectacles, atmosphere, sustained throughout by very skilful cinema score which enhances without intruding.

The film opens in a murky rustic household in which we find a cruel,violent and vindictive man, a an English Christian missionary, whose mouth are full of "God's" words thrashing a perfectly ordinary peasant wife in a sack cloth dress for some trivial act of "disobedience" in days when women were treated as part of a man's chattels, to be used like an animal in human form and to be beaten at will and in total subservience to the will of her husband. Then we were shown a scene in which a girl begged her elder brother, intended by her father to eventually go into a seminary, to teach her how to read and write when it was then against the customs for women to be educated. Then a travelling Greek scholar visited their village from whom the father asked to teach his son. He did so whilst the girl watched at the side in great curiosity with vigilant interest and memorized everything which the scholar taught her brother. When her brother failed to recite a Latin passage which he was supposed to learn but could not, the girl could no longer resist the temptation to do so and did so word perfect The scholar asked her whether she knew what she was reciting, not only was she able to explain what each word meant accurately literally, she was able to see through the metaphor or symbol and explained its underlying moral and religious significance. The scholar was astounded and urged her father to be allowed to teach her as well because he considered it a waste of God's gift if the girl were to remain uneducated. He then showed her a book in Greek, which the girl guarded as a precious gift. Her father found out the "heathen" book and forced her to scrape off the words from the parchment. She started but found she could not . Her father then reluctantly agreed with the Greek scholar on condition that he taught both together.

As the film developed, we were shown episodes in which the legendary intelligence of the girl attracted the attention of the local bishop and she was sent to be educated at the local seminary but her father substituted her elder brother. Upon hearing this, she could no longer tolerate it any more and escaped. By accident, she met her brother in the forest hovering all alone and in in trembling in fear in the shadows against a tree after witnessing the bishop's emissary being brutally killed by a local bandit in a robbery whilst on their way to the seminary, so that he could cut off the emissary's finger for the jewelled ring he was wearing. The brother and sister then travelled together to the seminary on their own and upon arrival, she impressed the bishop, a rather open minded man who treasured intelligence over doctrine, with the sensibleness and logic of her impeccable replies to his questions and with her knowledge and understanding of Greek, whereupon he ordered that she be taught by her most reluctant teacher, who thereafter deliberately made life miserable for her. But by an ironical twist, his particular strictness with her sharpened her mind even more and she was later praised by the bishop as a model student. Then there was a local plague and the abbot wanted the mother of a woman of two young children to separated and left to die, the girl stepped forward and made a proposal that she be allowed to treat the woman and if she were unable to do so, that she herself be banished from the monastery. She was supported in this by another friar. She made good her promise. Her fame then spread far and wide.

Later, the town was sacked by the conquering Norman at a wedding ceremony in which she was married off by her benefactor's jealous wife to an illiterate blacksmith on the lie that it was her benefactor who willed it, whilst the latter was off on a campaign because his wife was tipped off by her teacher at the local abbot that her husband had kissed her at a river. In the wild confusion of the pillage, she escaped, disguised as a man and was nursed back to health by a woman whose son she taught and who later himself became a bishop. In the meantime, she made her way as a pilgrim to Rome where she was accepted as a friar by another monastery and humbly worked as such until the those surrounding the Pope Leo IV was helpless about certain pains suffered by him that they decided to risk calling her in. She was given a sample of urine and asked to diagnose what was troubling the Pope. She dipped her finger into the vial and announced it was the urine of a pregnant woman. She passed the test and was allowed to treat the Pope which she did. The Pope was suffering from gout from too much meat and wine! She prescribed fruit, vegetables and water and together with some herbal medicine which she learned from her mother and also from the books of Hippocrates, the Pope was well within a week! The Pope was grateful and found her not only good at medicine but was knowledgeable and wise in replying to many of the questions for which he was puzzled and decided to make her his personal assistant and eventually when the Pope was murdered due to Vatican politics, she was elected Pope. She made her previous benefactor and now general of the French King who went to Rome to demand coronation by the Pope the head of her personal body guards. She was in love with him and bore his child. She fell during a public procession because she was in birth pangs. The film ends in blood: hers in two trails in her white papal dress trailing along the dirt of the Roman street and her lover's in an alley from the wounds inflicted by several assassins in an ambush by an ambitious local bishop in collusion with the French King. he girl was called Johannes Anglicus and reigned as Pope for about two and a half years in ending about 854 or 855 AD.

I'm sure the film would be loved by women libbers as a further example of the kind of unjust discrimination suffered by women at a age when Europe was still dominated by the an all male ecclesiastical church. She represented the the initial triumph of the values of reason over conventional superstition, prejudice and inequality when force and authority was supreme but like all reformers, she had to endure unendurable obstacles and had nothing to sustain her in her lone personal battle but her native intellignece, constant vgilance, a will of steel to follow the wishes of God to love her neighbors as herself and the secret but admiring asssistance of some of those whom destiny caused to cross her path and who did not allow their common humanity and decency to be completely stifled by ignorance and prejudice.

The film is an adaptation of the novel Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross. It was skilfully told through a mouth of an offscreen narrator who, like the Scarlett Letter claimed to have discovered a manuscript whom he thought it would be a sacrilege not to save for the benefit of posterity. Much of the tension of the film was sustainted by our fear whether or not her identity as a woman would somehow be discovered. The cinematic work was excellent, fully bringing out the atmosphere of darkness, superstition, vulgarity, violence of life in the Dark Ages.The film ends by the narrator wondering how many women had to disguise themselves as men to gain knowledge in the Dark Ages. I like in particular the film music by Marcel Barsoti which added enormously to the emotional impact of the film. A most satisfying evening at the cinema.