In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 4

So much of The New Pope's beauty rests in the conscious physicality of its actors, as obviously unique from character to character as the show's voices, faces, and wardrobes. Assente's curtly effete grace, Voiello's meditative stillness and minimalist gestures, Sofia's teasing, swaying walk and the playful movements she makes with her head -- there's an entire language of physical minutiae underpinning every scene. Every gesture fits within the larger mosaic of its performer's sense of presence and movement, giving the show an almost improvisational quality at times, a sense of mingled artistic styles very much in keeping with its eclectic soundtrack and sense of decor.

The dance scene which plays out during the credits is the episode's showpiece in this regard, giving Maurizio Lombardi a chance to flex as he lip syncs to Paolo Conte's 'L'Orchestrina' while spinning and shimmying through a tightly controlled dance routine. The sense of momentum is at once fluid and exquisitely taut, his arrests flawless, his every motion in perfect rhythm. Assente's dance isn't explicit ,or even suggestive, but there is a sexual element in its precise showmanship. It is the work of someone with an intimate, structured relationship to his own body, an expression of consummate mastery. It makes his tentative flirting with Gutierrez all the more heartbreaking.

The New Pope's fourth episode is a singular piece of television, intimately concerned with veils and membranes of all kinds. The glory hole used by Sofia and her husband. The habits of the striking nuns. The barrier between the digital and material worlds. And yet rather than titillating with some demimonde of hidden scandals and maneuvering, Sorrentino uses this fetishistic focus on concealment to pick at the ways in which we knowingly choose ruin and corruption in exchange for maintenance of the status quo. John Paul III admits as much to Gutierrez in a private confession, his noncommittal bitterness as infuriating as it is pitiable. John Malkovich's diction is precise throughout the scene, his stare unwaveringly fixed on some distant point. Here, finally, after so much ebullient celebration of bodies in motion, there is no movement at all.