Note: There will be spoilers.

I just re(re-re)-watched the Name of the Rose and I still absolutely love it.

The main character, William of Baskerville, is basically a Sherlock Holmes clone (he even says “Elementary!” to his apprentice a couple of times) except that he is a Franciscan monk living during the middle-ages and investigating a murder in an abbey that is busy with a debate on whether the church should be poor. As far as I am concerned, this is the perfect set-up for a movie.

The murder mystery aspect is impeccable, with a really clever murder weapon (a killing book!) and a perfect setting, an abbey hiding a labyrinthine library that contains thousands of volumes thought to be lost (you want to explore this abbey). Sean Connery is excellent in the role of William of Baskerville, a man of great intelligence, love for knowledge (he is not lying when he says that he fell in love… with books) but also inexpugnable vanity (he goes as far as falling into a trap set in front of a mirror!). Vanity that will catch him back later when, in his quest to prove that he is right, he will be the indirect cause of the burning of the library he so loves (his tears, when he realizes the consequences of his actions in the burning building, are heartbreaking).

While our attention is directed to the murder mystery, the question of church and riches is asked several times. Explicitly, it is the object of the religious debate happening in the abbey, but also by showing us a large variety of religious groups illustrating diverse positions:

• The Franciscans who made a vow of poverty,
• the pope’s emissaries dressed opulently and exploiting the people (their carriage is pushed by peasants until their reach the abbey’s gate),
• the Benedictines, extracting riches from peasants and fattening themselves but living in relatively austere conditions (the golden cross worn by the abbot is one of the few visible signs of luxury),
• the heretics who killed priests as a reaction to their greed (an active vow of poverty, by opposition to the Franciscans¹ who, despite their best wishes, let inequalities happen and preach inaction).

The priests debate whether Christ owned his robe and kill each other for a book while the peasants live in the mud, ready to do anything for food. The church turns a deaf ear to them, they pay taxes, are used as labor, and feed scraps, but they have literally no voice in the debate: no peasant speaks during the movie, ever². We are left with the indistinct feeling that peasants are uneducated brutes that have to be led by others, for their own good³.

Overall it is a great murder mystery that also manages to demonstrate a deep love for books and intellectually stimulating quests⁴ while asking whether this is really what we should be thinking about when people are suffering not that far away from us…