November bites like winter as I swiftly walk down Curzon Street. How glimmering Mayfair in the long urban nights. How beautiful London reflected on the wet pavements. I cross the foyer and rush to the bar after a glass of vodka, then straight to the screening room where we spot two central seats still unoccupied. When we realise that to reach them we are bothering the oldest couple in the cinema, the two are already kindly fiddling with jackets, scarves, hats and glasses—theirs full of rosé wine—to let us through. When they finally manage to open a narrow passage, we dive in with a million reverences, hiding the embarrassment behind the unbearable surgical masks. A Sorrentinian vignette.
Not long later Paolo is on the stage looking trimmer than ever and not much greyer than the last time I saw him. ‘It’s like when you have to go to the dentist,’ he says with his sly and melancholy half-smile. ‘You keep putting it off until the day comes when you can’t postpone any longer. This,’ pointing wearily at the screen behind him, ‘is the work of the dentist.’
The show begins from the sky. Below us, a sea lined by off-shore motorboats like gazelles in a blue savannah. Nothing extraordinary, until the camera rises to reveal Castel dell’Ovo, then Chiaia, Posillipo and beyond. A vintage Rolls-Royce elegantly runs down the stunning waterfront. We follow her at a distance to the magical rooms where the most beautiful and painful memories are to be unveiled.
Written four years ago for his children with the intention of never filming it—in his words, so that by reading it they could understand ‘why their dad is so weird’—The Hand of God is a film split in two like the city in which it takes place. The first part is a muffled endless summer where people eat mozzarella, beat aunties in fur and make erotic fantasies about those without. Where the biggest concern is whether el pibe de oro will finally join the Naples football team or not. But when the sun get suddenly eclipsed by a mean, unexpected moon, everything changes. The turmoil brought into Fabio’s life is the same narrative tear that gives to the film a new pace. In the second half, a providential series of figures go in and out of Fabietto’s life through a somewhat nostalgic montage that, with more haste I wish it had, will eventually take us to that fateful train to Rome. Taking off, after the sky again.
Although his recent Vatican series sported all Sorrentino’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies, it is thanks to the limitations of that very experience—says Paolo to Alfonso Cuarón in the Q&A after the screening—that he has learned to shoot with the simpler solutions that make this look so different from his previous ones. I wonder if it ever crossed his mind what Martin Scorsese once said, that when struggling with a scene he reflects on how Bresson would have shot it. And I wonder if this slightly more direct approach was dictated by the autobiographical nature of the film, by the desire to open up without filtering through heavy stylistic embroideries.
Bringing fresh, electric air to Sorrentino’s artistic path, although retaining many of his typical traits like a knack for aphoristic dialogues—at times a touch too unnaturally so—or a certain Fellinian taste for seamlessly moving through the facetious and the excruciating, The Hand of God is a venially flawed film that seduces nevertheless. And it does in the same way its author exposes himself, with the candid courage of vulnerability.
Coming back to it a few months after its release in winter, I noticed that along with the excitement of watching it again, I was particularly looking forward to revisiting two specific moments that, in fact, didn’t fail to move and enchant me again.
Fabietto and his mum are having a frugal dinner in the dim comforting light of the kitchen. It’s Fabietto’s birthday, but it’s a gloomy celebration as dad has been kicked out after a marital quarrel about his infidelities. ‘Really? Are you sure all you want for your birthday is milk porridge? Don’t you want me to make you something special?’ asks Maria. ‘Milk porridge is special. Besides, I remember, when I was little, and papà would go to Milan for work and you didn’t feel like cooking, we would make ourselves some milk porridge and then you’d let me sleep in your bed.’ It is a nostalgic time of family intimacy to which I can’t but respond with subdued tears. Even when Maria let a sense of bitterness sneak in. ‘Maybe he wasn’t really going to Milan.’
Later in the film, as Fabietto chases director Antonio Capuano for career advice, the conversation brings them to the sea. While the lights of dawn paint in cobalt the bay of Naples, the revered filmmaker presses on, shouting more and more aggressively. ‘In short, Schisa, you got anything to say? Or are you just a shit like everyone else? You got something to recount, or not?’ And I can’t help feeling just as questioned.
