You Love to See It: Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, begins with the young Francesco di Bernardone returning gravely ill from war with Perugia to recuperate at his lavish family home. Francesco’s illness is shot like a metamorphosis, his sweating body cocooned in linen bandages, his face shrouded with fine cloth at the height of his fever, as though beneath that fragile and permeable membrane he is undergoing physical changes as profound as the spiritual transformation he undergoes over the course of the film. After his recovery and a confrontation with his father over the latter’s obsession with wealth, Francesco renounces his name and, stripping naked, walks joyfully out of Assisi and into the countryside.

The film’s other major transformation occurs when pope Innocent III sheds his papal regalia to kiss the mendicant Francesco’s feet. Innocent’s robes are like something out of a Klimt painting, checkered with cloth-of-gold and precious stones, so heavy and stiffly embroidered that they stand on their own without him. His emergence from within these garments recalls the disinterring of a corpse, layers of extravagant cloth removed like the lid of a coffin from the frail form beneath. When the pope’s act of submission is complete, he withdraws back into this gilded shell as one cardinal quietly reassures another that the kiss was a conscious maneuver, a way for the church to win back the poor.

Zeffirelli’s movie, for all its ecstatic, reeling beauty, is not a sentimental one. It imbues its symbolic gestures with no special significance outside the moments in which they occur, preferring instead to focus on the action or lack of action underpinning them. When Francesco washes and feeds a group of lepers he demonstrates clearly that his awakening to the suffering of the world is not a matter of political expediency or convenience, but a life-altering personal change. Clothing is only a signifier, and even an earth-shaking realization can be smothered under the weight of our desire to remain in comfort. There is an exquisite simplicity to Zeffirelli’s treatment of Catholicism: on the one hand, Innocent III’s a moment of abject submission framed by the riches and grandeur of the Vatican, on the other Franceso washing and caring for the bodies of society's most wretched with no witnesses to his selfless generosity.