Autobiography is a tricky business. It pushes the writer towards self-analysis without any guarantee that the events and emotions are conveyed in a way true to one’s thoughts or decipherable by an audience – how do you fully portray the ineffability of memory? For Paolo Sorrentino, it means reconnecting to the spirit of his teen years through a blend of recreation and fantasy, of capturing how the joy of togetherness and the tragedy of loss shift our outlook on life. The Hand of God is a coming-of-age story and the director’s most personal film to date, set in an eternally glorious Naples that, in the first half, brims with a delectable assortment of Fellini-esque figures whose exaggerations allow for characters to be stripped of extraneous layers, revealing their essence. The second half, following a tragedy, sees a significant change in storytelling and a consequent loss of Sorrentino’s often breathtaking distinctiveness. Perhaps these more traditional scenes, too-swiftly following one another, will garner the polarizing director new audiences, but for those enamored of his baroque vision, it feels like he’s not quite sure how best to bare his soul.
The challenges must have been enormous. The director lost both his parents to a freak carbon monoxide leak when he was 17; the struggle to understand who he was, and to relearn how to see a world that can be so capriciously cruel, is the kernel of the film’s second part, so it’s understandable that the difficulties of processing all this led to him choosing a more straightforward approach. Before then, much as Fellini himself mined the figures of his childhood, reveling in their eccentricities, so too Sorrentino reimagines the world of his youth, populated with larger-than-life women, the warmth of his father, and the unsurpassed excitement of soccer star Diego Maradona’s arrival in his hometown.
For sheer gorgeousness, the opening shot is unsurpassed, mimicking a helicopter as it flies towards Naples on a perfect day heading towards the Castel dell’Ovo, golden in sunlight, moving west along the Chiaia where it follows a 1920s black Rolls Royce Phantom before curving round for a glorious view of Capri. That’s when the title appears, properly translated as “it was the hand of God,” and indeed if there is an Almighty, then surely the Bay of Naples is proof of a divine plan (the phrase applies to Maradona, though Sorrentino unquestionably means to expand its significance). It then cuts to nighttime chaos in the city, when the occupant of the Rolls pulls up to Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), an alluringly-dressed woman at a bus stop, and tells her he’s San Gennaro (Enzo Decaro), the locale’s main patron saint. He offers her a lift, addressing her by name and saying he’ll cure her infertility problem. In his palazzo, where an enormous chandelier lies artistically crashed in the frescoed reception room, he has her kiss a child monk’s head (the Monaciello of Neapolitan lore), slaps her rump, and sends her back home.
The scene is Sorrentino at his best, stunning to look at, deliciously enigmatic and ripe with inflated sexuality. Patrizia is the exhibitionist aunt of the director’s alter ego Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) and the object of his fantasies. Her inability to conceive has affected her sanity, and fights with her husband occasionally require the intervention of Fabietto’s parents Saverio (Toni Servillo) and Maria (Teresa Saponangelo, a stand-out). But family is family, and theirs is an expansive lot whose boisterousness acts like a warm protective cocoon. When the Naples soccer team buys Maradona’s contract, life seems to have achieved a form of perfection.
Then Saverio and Maria die from a carbon monoxide leak in their new weekend house, where Fabietto himself would have been had he not insisted on watching the Maradona game at home. Suddenly he’s an orphan on the threshold of adulthood, uncertain of what future he wants and frustrated that his older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) is carving out an independent life for himself. An encounter with movie director Antonio Capuano (Ciro Capano) makes him think that cinema could be a way of coming to terms with the messiness of existence.
It’s a lot to stuff into one movie – the English-language pressbook runs 40 pages – and it’s populated with a far richer pantheon of characters than described above, given ample space in some of the funniest scenes Sorrentino’s ever crafted. Revisiting and amplifying the impressions of his youth in the first half allow him to present a charged spectrum of life’s fullness, but then in the second part he appears constrained by the material and uncertain how to reflect on his psychological state. The director’s always been at his best when he can luxuriate in drawing out each scene, letting it develop much like the taste of a rich stew that lingers in the mouth. Yet after Fabietto’s parents’ death the scenes seem shorter, ending too soon, as if he’s cramming in more than he can fully process.
A scene of family friend Signora Gentile (Dora Romano) being beaten is unwarranted, as is Fabietto’s friendship with cigarette smuggler Armando (Biagio Manna), while a running joke about the Schisa daughter’s excessive time in the bathroom just falls flat. More effective is the upstairs neighbor Baroness Focali (Betti Pedrazzi, superb), a marvelously constructed character whose sense of superiority sits side-by-side with a knowing understanding of those around her. Some audiences may feel uncomfortable with certain depictions of women, especially how fat seems designed to elicit chuckles, but Sorrentino initially objectifies and then surprises by deepening character (especially in Patrizia’s case), much as our own gaze makes snap judgments before going beyond the surface.
Cinematographer Daria D’Antonio worked with Sorrentino previously as second unit and b camerawoman, and while she’s imbibed some of Luca Bigazzi’s fluidity, she utilizes a more sober visual style in keeping with the material. It’s appropriate, as is the shift in color to darker tones, yet the final shot, usually so distinctive in Sorrentino’s films, surprises by how unexceptional it feels. Music too is far less grandly used than usual, again in keeping with the subject matter. Though set in the mid-1980s, the designers wisely go light on too many period details.
Writer-Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri, Renato Carpentieri, Massimiliano Gallo, Betti Pedrazzi, Enzo Decaro, Sofya Gershevich, Lino Musella, Biagio Manna, Dora Romano, Ciro Capano
Producers: Lorenzo Mieli, Paolo Sorrentino
Executive producers: Riccardo Neri, Elena Recchia, Gennaro Formisano
Cinematography: Daria D’Antonio
Production Designer: Carmine Guarino
Costume Designer: Mariano Tufano
Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli
Sound: Emanuele Cecere, Silvia Moraes, Mirko Perri
Production companies: The Apartment (Italy), Netflix
World sales: Netflix
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian
129 minutes
