Gianfranco Rosi’s documentaries tend to plant a camera in challenging passages of everyday life that otherwise go largely unrecorded: the Middle Eastern war zones of “Notturno,” the island standoff between villagers and refugees in “Fire at Sea,” the highway-side working-class apartments of “Sacro GRA.” “In Viaggio,” however, sees him turn his gaze toward the opposite extreme of privilege and prominence, trying to find a new angle on Pope Francis, by any measure one of the world’s most photographed men. In doing so, he relinquishes some control over his lens: Tracking a decade’s worth of international papal visits to over 50 countries, the film is largely composed of archival footage from those tours, merged with Rosi’s own observation of the Pope’s trips to Malta and Canada.

This sets up an intriguing challenge for the Italian docker, as “In Viaggio” labors to imprint both a sense of intimacy and a sociopolitical point of view on ostensibly neutral, broadcast-minded material. It is in part successful, bringing viewers closer than any previous pontiff has dared permit to papal life away from the Popemobile, capturing occasional moments of repose and conversational candor — or at least a camera-curated semblance of such. If, by Rosi’s standards, it can’t help but feel a constrained work, shaped by the elusiveness of celebrity and the respectful distance of other people’s cameras, its balance of impossibly high-profile subject and low-key, humanizing perspective is sure to draw fascinated crowds when, following festival appointments at Venice, IDFA and elsewhere, it hits international arthouses. (Magnolia will release the film Stateside in March 2023.)

Rosi’s cautious, inevitably hat-in-hand approach to Pope Francis does, however, enable “In Viaggio” to pull off a neat duality of perspective, allowing both faithful Catholic devotees and papal skeptics to see what they will in his measured actions and diplomatic statements of spiritual principle and occasional anguish. “Global crisis has taken from us the ability to weep,” he says, gesturing at the sheer surfeit of conflict, poverty and disaster glanced upon in his world tour — mapped here by Rosi and editor Fabrizio Federico in non-linear fashion, criss-crossing years and continents, covering (among others) the United States, Cuba, Israel, central Africa, the Philippines and even Lampedusa, the Sicilian refugee hub so vividly documented in “Fire at Sea,” where the Pope offers prayers to the stateless. 

Sure enough, no tears are shed, and “In Viaggio’s” chaotic, calendar-bending itinerary suggests the numbing effect of such extensive travels on an octogenarian burdened with unseemly symbolic purpose. But Rosi does isolate moments and images of apparent emotional vulnerability and exhaustion between the man’s public appointments: The film’s most arresting footage is often of him quietly in transit, shoulders hunched, face creased in thought. He’s burdened, too, by disorder in his own holy house, professing shame over the long history of sexual abuse revealed within the Catholic Church and vowing that it may no longer be kept secret. “God weeps,” he says, though again, His human representative on Earth is required to be more stoic. 

Not long after, however, Rosi picks out footage of Pope Francis being considerably cagier on the subject of Chile’s disgraced, since-resigned Bishop Barros, assuming slander until his preferred degree of proof. “In Viaggio” captures the Pope, and by extension the whole Church, in an uncomfortable limbo state between defensiveness and progressiveness, though it keeps its own critique tacit and un-narrated, hinging on what the viewer brings to its hand-picked footage. Rosi comes closest to commenting via archival inserts outside the papal remit, sometimes from his own films: visceral horrors from “Fire at Sea” punctuate the Pope’s Lampedusa visit. Meanwhile, Rosi’s own shooting of the Pope’s recent Canadian tour — culminating in an apology to Indigenous communities for Church-abetted colonialist — is supported with historical imagery of abuses in Catholic residential schools that makes specific what his words do not.

Sometimes, however, the straight-up tour footage speaks for itself — not least in shots, much favoured by Rosi and Federico, that follow His Holiness from a high angle as the Popemobile cuts a serene white path through vast, fawning crowds. There’s an unavoidable streak of satire to such literally elevated pomp and ceremony, not least when countered by papal statements like, “In the reality of everyday life, people must have the ability to dream.” “In Viaggio” paints a polite but conflicted portrait of a man whose gestures of empathy and even contrition toward his legions of followers are undercut by his absurd remove from their reality — a world he tours extensively, but never inhabits.