New Pope exposes the true Vatican

Everyone loves a secret. You don’t have to be a Catholic to be curious about what goes on behind the walls of the Vatican, with its cabals of cardinals, risky finances, reputed factional divides and raunchy history.

Heaven only knows what goes on in that holy inner sanctum.

Conversation and conciliation between conservative Benedict and progressive Francis, as the Oscar-baiting film The Two Popes propounds on Netflix?

Or something closer to Italian maestro Paolo Sorrentino’s The New Pope, a fever dream of power, lust and faith foaming copiously over eight hour-long episodes?

Papal buffs will remember Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, in which Jude Law’s egotistical Pius XIII (originally Lenny Belardo) first grappled his way to princely power.

Sexy and surreal, it was nevertheless surprisingly uncontroversial.

Says the director: ‘‘Works about the Vatican in the past were of two types, either against it or completely hagiographic.

‘‘Our approach was to try to tell without prejudice what is the life of this world. These days, when you mention a priest, they are soon a suspect for the reason everybody knows.

‘‘So it is important to do a piece about priests where they can be saintly, they can be normal, they can be bad. It is important for them. I think it is natural that intelligent people in the church will react very well to this work.’’

The series found something close to closure when Pope Pius suffered a heart attack that plunged him into an apparently irreversible coma.

At the start of this series, renamed The New Pope, Lenny’s immobile body has become the focus of a cult: one radio station broadcast the sound of his unconscious breathing round the clock to the devoted masses. Meanwhile, the leaderless church is beset by terrorist and other threats. A new pope must be found.

Enter John Malkovich as Sir John Brannox, an erudite, aristocratic Englishman in cardinal’s silks who seems to have wafted in from Brideshead Revisited. Says Sofia (Cecile de France), the unfeasibly luscious Vatican marketing manager, ‘‘the man seems to be made of velvet’’.

Like Lenny, Brannox strives for holiness.

‘‘I don’t think sex is really the big motivator in his life. I think he is quite a haunted character in a lot of ways. Fragile, with a sense of the spiritual,’’ says Malkovich.

‘‘It is very much an exploration, an investigation, of the sacred and the profane, of the struggle to believe and the struggle to live, really.’’

Sorrentino was drawn initially to Malkovich as an actor who already had a peculiarly iconic aura.

He says: ‘‘There is a movie called Being John Malkovich; there is no Being Robert de Niro or Being Meryl Streep. Then I met him.

‘‘Talking to him for three, four hours I started to think that the best thing was to adapt the role to the real John Malkovich.

‘‘John Malkovich, in my perception, is wise, ironic. He is distant but can be warm, all things that were very, very interesting for the pope that I was looking for.’’

Sorrentino’s reveries of popedom are long on bling but short on explanation; much of the