In France Nanni Moretti’s Pope beats the Caiman

by Camillo de Marco

03/10/2011 - 454,658 viewers in 3 weeks for takings of about 2,79 Million Euros. Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam [trailer, film focus] [photo], in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May and out in the rest of Europe on September 7, has already definitely gained the best result of a Moretti film in France after The Son’s Room [trailer] (Golden Palm at Cannes in 2001 and 791,637 viewers) and has already taken over the legendary Dear Diary (421,559 viewers in 1994) and the more recent Caiman [trailer, film focus] (233,865 viewers in 2006).

Distributed in 165 copies by Le Pacte (which brought Gomorra [trailer, film focus] to France in 2008, seen by 514,270 viewers), Moretti’s film, with Michel Piccoli as the Pope highly acclaimed by critics, immediately placed itself in third place at the box office, and maintained the position the following week with 264 copies, to go down to sixth place with 294 copies in the third week of the programme.

The takings of Moretti’s film are certainly not comparable to national figures (€ 5,845,000) but highly respectable if we consider that The Skin I live In [trailer, film focus], the film by a great and hugely popular master of European cinema such as Pedro Almodóvar, has currently slipped down to 20th place in France after six weeks of programming and 667,783 viewers in total.

(Translated from Italian)