To paint a portrait, you first have to fall in love. This is what Igor Babailov believes, and he should know. The Russian-born artist, who’s made his home in the United States for 35 years, has painted hundreds of portraits, from George W. Bush to Nelson Mandela, from Patriarch Kirill of Russia to Akira Kurosawa to Hillary Clinton, and not one but three popes — John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis.
“I have to fall in love with the person I paint, otherwise it will never happen. It has to come from my heart,” Babailov said.
The artist, who is also a teacher and speaker, remembers unveiling Francis’ portrait to the pope, who listened attentively as he explained, through an interpreter, the composition of the work and all the details he had included.
“His eyes lit up when I pointed at the children,” Babailov said. “He loved children.” Francis pointed toward his own heart and murmured that he was touched.
The portrait is titled “The Holy Cross” and shows Francis standing under the Holy Family. Behind him, a faint rainbow traces a bridge between Hagia Sophia and the dome of St. Peter’s, which is lit from inside, with a line of pilgrims making their way toward the door. The composition of the entire piece is essentially cross-shaped, with Pope Francis at the center, covering his silver pectoral cross with his hands in a gentle, protective gesture, and looking heavenward with his characteristic placid smile.
Below him we see Francis in two vignettes emblematic of his papacy: in one, sheltering and embracing poor children, and in the other, about to press his lips to the newly washed foot of a dark-skinned person in a wheelchair.
“A portrait is not just a visual likeness; it’s the story of who the person is. That’s why I incorporated him washing feet. That was him in his heart. That was his nature,” Babailov said.
It’s a tricky business, faithfully portraying a real human being with a complex life and legacy. But Babailov insists that a thoughtful painting is better than a photograph for preserving someone’s likeness for future generations.
“For some reason, we trust the camera. But a camera is a cold-blooded machine,” he said. It flattens everything, and it can’t make any decisions about what is and is not important in an image. An artist can make these distinctions and can organize a work to draw the eye first to what is most meaningful.
“Everything is important to a camera,” Babailov said. “But an artist can select.”
Babailov said that, although the three popes whose portraits he painted were very different, they all had in common a palpable sense of holiness. Not so with everyone who sits for one of his portraits! Babailov has accepted commissions for all sorts of people.
Although he spends hours gazing into the face of his subject — trying, in a sense, to read their souls — he never feels the need to edit out anything he sees or to flatter his subject.
“That never, ever, ever comes to my mind. Just the opposite: I see beauty in everyone,” he said. “That may sound strange. People have contradictions. But as a portrait painter, I have to fall in love with the person I paint.”
Trained to observe the human form
He is in love, in fact, with the human body itself, from the inside out. Babailov, whose father was a painter and whose mother was a teacher, painted his first portrait at the age of 4….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
I forgot to write up this year’s Mandatory Lent Film Party plans! Thanks to a few readers for reminding me.
On Fridays in Lent, our family watches some edifying, well-made films, with at least a loosely spiritual theme, preferably one that we probably wouldn’t otherwise get around to seeing.
In past years, I’ve done short reviews for the movies we watched. My past lists are here (2021) and here (2020), and you can find the individual movie reviews under the tag Lent Film Party. I will also link them separately at the end of this post.
Here’s our list of possibilities for this year:
SAINT PHILIP NERI: I PREFER HEAVEN
THE SECRET OF KELLS
OF GODS AND MEN
TREE OF LIFE
THE WAY
SILENCE
THE CHOSEN
THE YOUNG MESSIAH
MOLOKAI
THE JEWELER’S SHOP
THE SCARLET AND THE BLACK
THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
A HIDDEN LIFE
KEYS TO THE KINGDOM
We’ve already watched three movies this Lent: Fiddler on the Roof, The Scarlet and the Black, and The Secret of Kells. I’ll do quickie reviews for the first two here, but I want to write up The Secret of Kells separately.
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)
100% stands up. I’ve seen this movie countless times, and it just gets better. We ended up watching it over two nights, because it’s three hours long (it has an intermission, so you can split it up easily).
This show is a masterclass in how to sustain a metaphor without wielding it like a club. Tevye openly tells the audience right from the beginning that “every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our necks” — and then he proceeds to work out what that means himself, throughout the rest of the movie. At the end, he invites the fiddler (sans roof), with a nod of his head, to come along with them to whatever’s next, and as he trudges forward with his load, he follows the music. So you see that his story is not over. Oh, it’s so good. Every element is perfect, the songs, the casting, the choreography, the dialogue, the cinematography, the pacing.
It’s the story of a Jewish family in a tiny shtetl in Russia at the turn of the century, trying to maintain their identity despite cultural pressure from a swiftly changing world, and also from overt attacks in the form of pogroms. This movie shows more or less the story of my family, on both my parents’ sides. But it will feel personal to other viewers, as well, to see the Russians suddenly and senselessly descending on their neighbors. Different era, similar pointless horror and betrayal.
Early in the movie, when Tevye has agreed to marry his oldest daughter to the butcher, they go to a tavern together and drink “to life,” and their jubilant toast is joined by a crowd of Russian soldiers. Normally the two groups keep to themselves, but not tonight. The choreography here illustrates so much tension and menace and emotion. Is it an invitation, or a threat? (Which, by the way, is the question Tevye has to ask himself throughout the whole story.)
Tevye is cautious but doesn’t want to be cowardly or cold, so he accepts the challenging invitation to dance in the Russian style, and as he’s caught up in it he shouts, “I like it!” But he almost immediately learns that good will is not enough. The next scene that shows dancing, at his daughter’s wedding, starts out with such jubilation, and ends in ruin, shattering devastation. And there is nothing to do but, as Tevye roars out into the darkness, “Clean up.”
I don’t really know how it hit the kids, although I definitely heard some weeping from the couch. I was glad they saw how Tevye speaks so naturally and constantly to God, and I was glad they saw how parents struggle and suffer while trying to figure out the balance between accepting changes they don’t like or understand because they love their kids and can’t really control them anyway, and holding the line for what’s really important. It’s not as easy as it looks! When Tevye is trying to work out whether or not he can see his way to making sense of his third daughter’s relationship, he says with a crack in his voice, “If I try to bend that far, I’ll break,” and I think even a teenage daughter who thinks her overbearing parents are unreasonable ogres will see that this man is really trying, and really suffering. (I definitely did, as a teenage daughter of a sometimes ogreish father.)
The kids were resistant to watching this movie because they remember it as a huge downer, but it truly isn’t. It doesn’t shy away from tragedy, but it’s also extremely funny, and tender, and sweet, and it ends, improbably, with hope. My Lenten wish for you is that you watch this movie.
Synopsis: The true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who uses clever ruses, trickery, and brazen courage to organize an effort that hid and saved the lives of thousands of Jews and escaped POWs in Nazi-occupied Rome.
Here’s a trailer:
Terrible trailer that kind of does justice to the movie, which we all found underwhelming. At 2 hours and 23 minutes, it was made for TV, and it does not translate well into a single night of viewing. There are many extraneous scenes of people talking vehemently to each other across a desk or on the phone. The repetition may have been necessary to keep the TV viewer up to speed across several episodes, but it turns the movie into a bit of a slog.
For a movie that takes place partially inside the Vatican with a monsignor for a hero, I found it weirdly secularized. The priests who are martyred die explicitly for the people, which sounds good, but I dunno, you’d think they’d mention something vaguely spiritual while facing a death squad! I have only seen the movie once, but no portrayal or prayer or faith in God stands out, and they all seem to be relying on sweaty masculine vigor and cunning, rather than ever on grace. I understand making a religious story accessible to a general audience, but this was a pretty egregious case of Jesusectomy, except for literally the last five minutes and the little written epilogue that appears on the screen.
Tell me if I’m being unfair. It’s not that I expected it to be one kind of movie, and was disappointed that it was a different kind. It was that the final scene was extremely powerful … and completely unearned by the previous two hours. I’d pay good money for a remake that starts with what happens at the end, and then spends the movie explaining what led up to that. Instead, it was a dated, somewhat plodding adventure movie with priests, with a tacked-on religious finale that appears out of nowhere. Tell me if I’m being unfair.
It was a pretty good historical antidote to the myth that the Church just sat on its hands and made nice with the Nazis (or even that the pope was an antisemite — a view which even the author of Hitler’s Popehas recanted); but it still soft balled what actually happened. It portrayed Pius XII as an overly cautious political player who was mainly concerned with staying safely neutral and not making things worse, but had a thing or two to learn from this bold monsignor, who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. In fact, the Vatican saved tens of thousands of Jews or more through numerous secret means. Could and should they have done more, or done things differently? I don’t know. The facts are still being sorted through and analyzed. One thing I tell my kids often is that, if someone tells you history is simple and straightforward, they’re either stupid or lying.
I guess I give the movie a B- overall. It wasn’t exciting enough to be a wartime adventure movie (there was only one attempted stabbing in a shadowy Vatican hallway, followed by a punching and a shooting! There should have been one every twenty minutes!), but it didn’t have enough spiritual or even interior content to justify the ending.
So the next week, I chose something completely different: The Secret of Kells, which I hadn’t seen before. And I’ll review that next!
Here’s the direct links to previous Lent Film Party Reviews from last year:
And Vladimir Putin is so, so good at being the crazy, crazy president of Russia. Check out this birthday present he gave himself:
PIC Putin as Hercules
These are just two. There’s a whole gallery full of paintings depicting him as Hercules, doing Herculean things. I guess this was done voluntarily as a tribute to him from his admiring citizens. Much like when my husband comes home in the evening and we are all sitting on the floor wearing bowls on our head because the two year old told us to. It’s not that we are afraid of her! It’s really not. It’s just that . . . sometimes, it’s better to do what she says. And to like it!
Deadspin quotes eight different major news outlets who’ve dispatched reporters to Mayak, where the town’s LGBT community goes to drink and dance. From a reporter at The New Republic:
On Saturday night, I decided to check it out, along with friends who work for The Guardian, TIME, and The Independent. A flock of AP reporters was already there, enjoying mojitos. In the hallway, a TV reporter was interviewing two girls in leopardware on camera. Nearby, a Danish TV reporter named Matilda told me she was interested in doing a story “that isn’t victimized.” It was an important story because “gay rights are a big issue in Europe.” The bar owner, she said, was busy giving interviews in a private room. “We called last week to schedule an interview and we got 15 minutes between the Finns and the Swiss.” Her local fixer tapped me on the shoulder. “There are three more journalists sitting next to her,” he said. But, he explained, they were Russian correspondents. “They’re confused,” he said. “They don’t know what to do, professionally.”
“We’ve given over 200 interviews in the last month,” says Mayak owner Andrey Tanichev. Every country has sent its correspondents, he says, “except the Spanish, God bless them.” The Americans have sent the most reporters, but the BBC has set a record: they came by four times.
Where have I head this before? Oh, yes . . . in Ishmaelia:
The bunch now overflowed the hotel. There were close on fifty of them. All over the lounge and dining-room they sat and stood and leaned; some whispered to one another in what they took to be secrecy; others exchanged chaff and gin …
“What are you all here for?” asked Corker petulantly of a newcomer. “What’s come over them at home? What’s supposed to be going on, anyway?”
“It’s ideological. And we’re only half of it. There’s twenty more at the coast who couldn’t get on the train. Weren’t they sick at seeing us go? It’s lousy on the coast.”
“It’s lousy here.”
“Yes, I see what you mean . . . “
From Evelyn Waugh’s monstrously hilarious, not-entirely-brutal satirical novel Scoop, wherein the wrong John Boot accidentally gets sent to the front lines of what may or may not be an important war, depending on where the all the reporters end up.
Unproceed Sochiward, folks. And take your cleft sticks with you.
