By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Can you smell that? The scent of a fresh decade is unique, like smelling a newborn's soft skin or the smell of rain. Both of these scents do something to us, giving us a chemical boost in the brain.

The idea of a new decade seems to be doing something similar to us—tickling the brain. I have spent the last month reading social media and listening to people. The energy is undeniable: 2020 is apparently going to be a Big Year.

In light of the previous 24 months and more, I chose to spend that time asking the Universe quite fervently for a small year. This is unreasonable of course but after being nagged endlessly about “the power of hope" I have decided to embrace it.

One of the most unexpected boosts to this new hope strategy came from an unexpected place. A movie, in fact, that consists of a conversation between two men about power, responsibility, and that most impossible of tasks: doing the right thing. What is the right thing to do? How do we know? What are the consequences of our actions, our inactions? And, most shockingly for me, the suggestion that absolute certainty in your own opinions can actually be a form of deadly pride. That is where the saying I like to offer up ad nauseam in this column comes from: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

What made this movie is the struggles of powerful men and the human condition. It is based on a play and presented as being “inspired by true events.”

That is the code for “we totally took huge artistic licence here so this falls in the grey area between a documentary and a work of pure fiction.”

As a lapsed Catholic this gave a good insider giggle because now they cannot quite be sued for whatever the movie version of outright lying is by The Vatican. With more than one billion members across the world, it is not a city-state slash institution that you should piss off without good reason.

I applaud the playwright and the film makers for making it a work of art, and thus immune from the pedantic grumblings of literalists.

If you have not guessed by now, the movie is titled The Two Popes and takes you through a fictional account of a conversation between Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio and his boss Pope Benedict XVI over a number of days, culminating in, well, a Church with two popes. And here they are, today, just like us, in 2020, trying to figure out what the right thing to do is to serve their people.

If you are into politics and current affairs and calm think movies about the world today, maybe watch it? If you are a movie buff, it is absolutely gorgeous: a visual treat with a soundtrack that is unexpected. Not to mention the acting, oh, the acting!

But ultimately, it is just a good movie and might stir something in you, like the hope for a new decade and an election year, or the smell of rain showering down on your crops, or the scent of a baby’s skin that reminds us how fragile and fleeting this challenging life is.

As a bonus, if you are not Catholic or familiar with the Church you get to see a lot of our weird cool stuff, like a cultural tourist. For your consideration.

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]