LA GRAZIA**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 12

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (IL DIVO) and actor Toni Servillo reunite for the seventh time for LA GRAZIA - a patient, melancholy drama about love and grief. Servillo plays an Italian President called Mariano.  His character is grappling with whether to sign a Bill legalising euthanasia. He must also sign whether to give a presidential pardon to a woman and a man serving sentences for murdering their respective spouses.  The first was escaping from a violent marriage, the second claims he was committing an act of mercy as his wife was suffering from Alzheimers.   It feels as though the President, a Catholic and a Jurist, is playing for time and running down the clock as he is in the final months of his term, much to the chagrin of his devoted daughter and fellow Jurist Dorotea. Meanwhile in his personal life, Mariano is grieving his wife Aurora, but gripped with suspicions that she had an affair forty years prior with his fellow cabinet minister.

The film takes a leisurely pace as Mariano derps around the Quirinale, pondering what to do, or distracting himself by listening to rap music. This creates a patient meditative feel that I enjoyed but I still feel that it was around 20-30 minutes too long. But to compensate, the film contains flashes of profound hilarity, such as the awards ceremony roughly half way through the film, and builds to a deeply moving and profound conclusion. Much is made of the fact that the Italian phrase La Grazia can mean religious grace, but also a pardon, and also compassion.  

The true joy of the film is just watching Toni Servillo give a masterclass performance full of warmth, compassion and occasionally mischief.  He won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the performance, and rightly so. He can convey more with a single eyebrow raise than most actors with a full fireworks show of histrionics.  Servillo is well matched in the first half of the film by Anna Ferzetti who plays his daughter, and also by Milvia Marigliano as the art critic and lifelong friend Coco Valori.  Coco is a fascinating character. Comic relief in the first half of the film but building toward something more profound and deeply moving. 

LA GRAZIA has a running time of 131 minutes. It played Venice, where Toni Servillo won the Volpi Cup, Telluride and London.  It opens in the US on December 5th.

THE HAND OF GOD**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

 

Paolo Sorrentino’s THE HAND OF GOD begins as a kind of group portrait of working class Neapolitans in the 1980s.  It has the feel of a menagerie of grotesques, and Sorrentino feels no politically correct restriction on mocking the fat, the disabled, the absurdly made-up or the mentally ill. This might sound distasteful and yet, and yet, over that hour we come to feel a kind of familial familiarity with these everyday oddballs, delighting in their joy when Maradona signs for Napoli and enjoying their practical jokes. We even come to admire and love the genuinely loving mother and father of the family, delighting in the depiction of an ordinary happy marriage. 

Observing all of this loveable craziness is the younger son of the family, Fabie, whose quiet gaze is pre-directorial. For this is the third film in two days that I've watched where a director tells a fictionalised version of their childhood.  And to be sure, Sorrentino is not going to spend the second hour of this film in rather trivial but engrossing depictions of life in 1980s Napoli. Instead, major life events occur that force Fabie into being the protagonist rather than voyeur of his own life, and of this film.

I absolutely adored this movie. It is by turns hilarious and tragic and strange and whimsical. I merely dock it a star for having had an obvious ending point (for me) in a cathartic playground scene, but lingers for thirty minutes longer. 

THE HAND OF GOD has a running time of 130 minutes and played Venice 2021. It wil be released on Netflix on December 15th.

LORO

Paolo Sorrentino's latest film LORO (THEM) is a film about the obsequious corrupt parasites that tried to make money during the reign of the abominable Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.  Infamous for amassing a media empire, then using the presidency to protect himself from prosecution and taxes, Berlusconi was a glutton for money and sex.  Moreover, in many senses he was the precursor and pioneer for a new breed of businessman turned populist demagogue - with a line leading from him via Orban to Trump.  Accordingly, one might have expected an urgent and excoriating film treatment from Italy's premier arthouse film-maker, Paolo Sorrentino.  After all, Sorrentino has form!  His nonpareil take-down of Italian Prime Minister Andreotti, IL DIVO, is one of my all-time favourite films.  And his bizarre surreal TV series THE YOUNG POPE is a similar, if fantastical, take-down of the corruption in the Vatican and its links to contemporary Italian politics. 

Imagine, then, my disappointment in finding LORO to be a rather toothless affair. Worse still, baggy, directionless, dare I say it? Dull!  Maybe this is a result of the format that I watched - a still over-long 150 minute compression of what were originally two separate feature films released in Italy last year.  But that still doesn't excuse this highly disjointed, weird final product.

The film opens with its focus on a sleazy low-level businessman who wants to move into the orbit of "him".  He pimps out pretty much every woman he knows, including his partner, for advancement.  He courts one of Berlusconi's mistresses. And makes a final expensive gamble - filling a villa with prostitutes and drugs and dance music - hoping to tempt Berlusconi to this apparently all-summer long bunga bunga party.  This section is really dull. It feels like a succession of beautifully shot living tableaux, set to moronic dance music. Endless shots of scantily clad women.  At some point you ask yourself when the depiction of sexual exploitation is itself exploitative - when the depiction of vacuous people is itself vacuous. 

It's only about an hour into the film that we meet Silvo, as played by the always charismatic Toni Servillo. The disappointment is that Silvio is shown in an almost sympathetic light. He's out of office and out of the good graces of his wife - showing a vulnerability that's disarming.  As the audience, we delight in him flexing his con artist muscles, persuading a random Italian housewife to buy a non-existent flat that she can't afford. THIS is the movie I wanted. A movie that explained Berlusconi's brilliance and charm and ruthlessness. But it's just that one scene.  Finally his wife breaks away and in this desperation he finally falls for the bait in the villa next door. But after so much moral corruption on show, he hardly seems worse than the rest of them. And maybe that's Sorrentino's point?  We get the President we deserve, resemble, need to enable us?

LORO has a running time of 150 minutes. It is currently available to watch in cinemas and on streaming services in the UK and Ireland.

YOUTH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Nine

Oh man. Paolo Sorrentino’s IL DIVO is arguably the best movie I’ve ever watched at a film festival, and it’s the only one I loved so much I watched it twice. And his last movie, THE GREAT BEAUTY, was a work of magical visual beauty and deep melancholic investigation into ageing and art. So I came to his first ever English language film with great expectations. Expectations that were, with the exception of a few flashes of brilliance, disappointed. There are two over-riding reasons for this: first a chronic lack of narrative drive and energy; second, uneven tone that undermines rather than enhances the whole.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 15 - THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Rabartu Smitu, Rabartu Smitu, 

tashiwa ga suki Rabartu Smitu

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a visually inventive but often frustratingly slow-paced film that bravely tries to juxtapose whimsical comedy and serious history with problematic results. 

Sean Penn plays an ageing, bored and depressed former goth rock-star called Cheyenne. His high-pitched voice and Robert Smith clothes mark him as a man-child, trapped in his adolescence, but anchored by the love of his down-to-earth wife, Jane (Frances McDormand) and the friendship of emotionally scarred fan-girl, Mary. The death of his father forces Cheyenne back to America. Almost on a whim, he sets off on a meandering road-trip, searching for the Nazi that had tormented his father. But despite a very moving late scene of confession and humiliation, this is not really a revenge movie at all, but rather a character drama about an estranged son breaking beyond that emotional vacuum in order to become a man.

The casting is strong - with Sean Penn and Frances McDormand complemented by strong cameos from Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch (as a Simon Wiesenthal cipher) and Heinz Lieven as the Nazi. And the script, by Umberto Contarello, contains many belly-laughs, and superlative dramatic set-pieces. But as with all Paolo Sorrentino movies, the true stars are Luca Bigazzi's fluid, deliberate, elegant camera-work and the flamboyant use of the musical score, this time, by the legendary David Byrne. Technically, this film is flawless and imaginative. 

But it didn't grab me, fascinate me, in the same way as Sorrentino's previous films - IL DIVO and THE FAMILY FRIEND. This is partly because the character of Cheyenne is, however sympathetic, also rather slow and whimsical, and after a while this started to grate. It's partly because the road-trip in the second half is so random and slow. I know that this is the point - that is should have the kind of magic and wonder of THE STRAIGHT STORY - but I did become very impatient with it. And finally, I guess I just felt too uncomfortable with the deliberate juxtaposition of the Holocaust with the character of Cheyenne - the man least likely to come to mind as a Nazi hunter. Something about the man using the hunt for the Nazi as a kind of distraction from a life of satiety, and then as a kind of agent toward self-knowledge, felt weird and exploitative. I know this was a deliberate provocation from Sorrentino - but for me it just didn't work. 

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE played Cannes 2011 where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It opened earlier this year in France and is currently on release in Italy. It opens in Germany on November 10th, in Sweden on November 18th, in the US in December, in Australia on December 26th, in Poland on February 3rd, in Spain in March and in the UK on March 9th. 

THE FAMILY FRIEND/L'AMICO DI FAMIGLIA - sinister Italian comedy

Paolo Sorrentino's new film, THE FAMILY FRIEND, is one of the most sinister and stylish movies I have seen. Set in contemporary working-class Italy, the central character is a morally and physically grotesque tailor and money-lender called Geremia (Giacomo Rizzo). He portrays himself as a kind-hearted simple man who helps out friends in trouble but really he is a shrewd, sleazy, shuffling little man who uses his hold over people to insinuate himself into their lives. It is truly horrifying to see Geremia lusting over the beautiful young bride (Laura Chiatti) who's wedding he has financed. Similarly horrifying is his relationship with his house-bound mother - a character straight out of David Fincher movie. At the same time, there is something absured about Geremia's situation - a weak, vulnerable looking old man who is actually rather powerful. Sorrentino underlines the black comedy by giving Geremia a natty line in potato-filled headbands (cure for migraine, apparently) and a side-kick goon who's obsessed with Country and Western music.

THE FAMILY FRIEND gives us, in Geremia, a truly memorable character and a tragi-comic plot. But what raises it even further above the norm is Paulo Sorrentino's originality of vision. He films the story with a cool detachment that mirrors the deadpan humour of the piece. Most impressive, though, is his choice of music on the soundtrack. Geremia at his most scheming is accompanied by Elgar's Cello Concerto - not a piece I would have typically associated with such a scene - but a brilliantly bathetic choice. Later, we have plenty of early 80s synth music which gives us a cheap porn-movie feel. And even more improbably, the inclusion of Antony and the Johnsons.

In short, THE FAMILY FRIEND is the sort of movie that cine-addicts dream of: it surprises even the most jaded viewer and piques even the most satiated appetite.

THE FAMILY FRIEND was released played Canned and London and was released in Italy in 2006. It opened in the UK last week and opens in France on May 2nd.