An exhaustive Italian guide to Paolo Sorrentino’s 'The Hand of God'
Sunday, January 30, 2022 at 2:20PM by Elisa Giudici
As your Italian correspondent here at The Film Experience, it's my duty to give you an exhaustive guide to our current Oscar finalist. Or, at least, it is my attempt. I am not from Naples and The Hand of God is a movie that's deeply connected to Neapolitan folklore and culture. Let’s start from the beginning though we hope you've already screened the movie on Netflix...
Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God is a coming of age story of a teenage boy set in 1980s Naples. The main protagonist, Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), is the alter ego of the director himself. The Oscar-winner has stated many times that this story is a fictional continuity made up of fragmented memories -- funny, happy, and dramatic events that shaped his adolescence.
Movie instead of therapy
Paolo Sorrentino has joked a lot about why he made this movie:
“I could have paid an analyst to try to face my traumatic experiences regarding my parent’s death. Instead, I preferred to be paid by Netflix to make a movie about it”.
He made the movie for his kids too, to help them comprehend the introverted, melancholic nature of their father's temper. During a recent TV interview, he said that The Great Beauty (2013), his Oscar-winning feature, was the movie he always wanted to make, while The Hand of God (2021) is the one he needed to.
His friendship with Toni Servillo
Sorrentino faced some tough moments in shooting The Hand of God, re-living the earliest tragedy of his life. For this reason, he asked his muse Toni Servillo to play the role of this fictional father. The actor is a dear friend of his and a sort of father figure, too. He found some comfort in having him on set. In Sorrentino's acceptance speech for The Hand of God's Silver Lion at 2021's Venice Film Festival, he said a lot of people asked him why he keeps on working with Servillo. His answer:
“Look where we arrived together”.
The importance of Naples
One is tempted to associate Sorrentino with Rome due to The Great Beauty. While the director loves the Eternal city he describes his relationship with Naples as more conflicting. The years dramatized in The Hand of God were the happiest of his life, until the death of his parents. With his first steps into the world of cinema, he felt the urge to leave his home city behind and head to Rome.
Naples back then was, he says, “a magical, dangerous place in which everything can happen around every corner”. You could see Maradona driving a modest car at a stop, spy on Federico Fellini during an audition, or share a magical night with a new friend with a criminal record. All in the same city.
The Hand of God showcase some easily recognizable places in the city if you ever visit: Galleria Umberto I (where Fabietto’s father told him about his first kiss), Piazza del Plebiscito (more about this one later), and the archeological site Piscina Mirabilis (the pool where the meeting between Fabietto and director Antonio Capuano takes place) as well as San Paolo Stadium. There are also some iconic locations outside the city like Capri’s Piazzetta and Stromboli volcano.
Naples has changed a lot since the 1980s but, for Sorrentino "it is still a place of strong emotions and memories, good and bad".
Maradona
In The Hand of God, Sorrentino explains very carefully how the superstar athlete Maradona (glimpsed briefly and played by Daniele Vicorito) saved him from a tragic death and why he is such an important figure in his life, more than just a football player. This feeling is wildly shared by Neapolitans, even 40 years after Maradona lead the Napoli Football team to victory in the Italian major Football League.
Napoli’s walls are covered by murals dedicated to a figure everyone adopted as Neapolitan: both a sports hero and a troubled man, Maradona was able to win the heart of an entire city. Just a few days after Maradona’s death in 2020, Neapolitans started to ask to change the name of the city stadium from San Paolo to Diego Armando Maradona Stadium (and they got their wish).
Sorrentino also name-checked Maradona as a source of inspiration (with Fellini, Talking Heads, and Martin Scorsese) in his Oscar acceptance speech back in 2014. Maradona heard the speech and sent him one of his football shirts. Sorrentino had it framed and hung in his house.
Antonio Capuano
An older member of the Italian press at the Venice Film Festival assured me that Sorrentino's depiction of Antonio Capuano (played by the actor Ciro Capano) is faithful to his character. Like Maradona, Capuano is an Neapolitan legend but an underground one.
During the ’90s his movies showed the harsh reality of life in Naples and made quite an impression. In 1998, he directed Polvere di Napoli (The Dust of Naples), a comedy written with the help of his disciple Sorrentino. Sorrentino’s paycheck for the screenplay helped him start his career as a director. Like Fabietto in the film, right after his first experience on Capuano's movie set, Sorrentino did not follow the older directors advice to remain in Naples.
Pino Daniele
Another huge Neapolitan icon, another recent loss for the city: singer and songwriter Pino Daniele died in 2015. His death was a deeply felt loss for the entire nation. "Napule é (Naples is)" is one of his most famous and most beloved songs: it is the one Fabietto is listening to with his walkman while leaving the city behind.
The song lyric is in Neapolitan and describes the thousands of details of the city Pino Daniele and Paolo Sorrentino grew up in. You can read an English translation of the lyrics here, but the emotional weight of the song is in the warm, loving, and nostalgic voice of Daniele, an innovator of Italian music and songwriting. Son of a harbor worker, he was a self-taught guitarist and musician well before becoming a popular singer. In the 80’s he became a music legend, shortly before The Hand of God takes place.
In 1981, just a year after a huge earthquake in Irpinia destroyed the lives of thousands, Pino Daniele and a group of other musicians held a free concert in Napoli's biggest public square, to lift the gloomy spirit of the city. It was supposed to be a modest gig filled only by word of mouth. But in the endover 200,000 people filled the Piazza del Plebiscitoturning this concert into one of the most legendary in Italian history. Pino Daniele said he cried for hours after the concert, deeply moved by the response of the city.
Piazza del Plebiscito can be seen in one of the first scenes of the movie: back then buses and cars could still cross it. It is here, waiting for the bus, that Patrizia meets Saint Gennaro and "o’ munaciello".
O' munaciello... "The Little Monk"
At the very beginning of the movie, Patrizia (Luisa Rainieri) tells her husband she has met Saint Gennaro (patron saint of the city) and the munaciello (the little monk). The little monk gave her money, touched her ass (!) and granted her her wish to become a mother. It is played like a lie or a hallucination in pure Sorrentinian style. Everyone thinks Patrizia is a little crazy, but not the protagonist Fabietto: he believes his aunt. At the very end of the movie, during a stop at Formia train station, he sees the munaciello just outside the train window.
The little monk also known as the child monk is a fascinating figure of Neapolitan folklore. It is said his legend is based on the tragic 15th century life of the son of a rich merchant daughter. Her name was Caterinella Frezza and after her poor working class lover Stefano Maricond was killed, she gave birth to a small, deformed child. He was always dressed in monk cloths, probably because his mother had hidden him in a convent to avoid the scandal. Probably affected by a severe form of dwarfism, the munaciello was considered able to grant good or bad luck when seen in the streets. According to some tales, he was killed for this very reason, but Neapolitans kept reporting sightings for centuries after his death: whatever the real life story, the little monk has become an immortal myth.
Neapolitans are a superstitious population and when someone is desperate to obtain something, they hope to meet the little monk. If the chosen one is brave enough to follow, the monk will reportedly lead him or her to a real treasure consisting of gold and money. It is forbidden to reveal the meeting with the munaciello to any other human being. The munaciello is a benevolent spirit who could turn naughty, even evil when provoked. He also loves beautiful women.
So, there is an alternative, magical interpretation of the opening scene of The Hand of God: Patrizia was desperate to get pregnant, so she met the munaciello. He... appreciated... her body (as all the men in the film do) and gave her a small fortune to show his favor. Patrizia told her family about him (forbidden!) so she lost all the good influence of the spirit, her baby, and her sanity.
The sex scene
Let's talk about one of the weirdest scenes of 2021 cinema: the sex scene between Fabietto and the old Baroness. Sorrentino has said that many actresses refused the role, embarrassed by the prospect of this very scene. Betty Pedrazzi took up the challenge, understanding it correctly: Sorrentino considers it not as a sexual intercourse but more like “an act of volunteering”, helping the young boy to move on. He is grateful to the actress for her courage and for the light, tender touch with which she interpreted the scene. The young star of the film Filippo Scotti has commented on the scene, too. He says he was not embarrassed by it, but on the contrary, was impressed by the scene from the first screenplay read. On the set he claims it was one of the easiest scenes to shoot.
When I saw the movie the first time, I linked this very scene and the decadent opulence of the Baroness’s house to an iconic line of Jep Gambardella in The Great Beauty about his teenage self liking “old people houses’ smell”.
from left to right: Fabieto, with his mother, brother, and father at a neighbour's house.
The wooden kitchen of the neighbors
Fabietto’s mother loves doing pranks at the expenses of other. At one point during the film she convinces her neighbor Graziella that the famous director Franco Zeffirelli himself had noticed her at a party. She phones Graziella, pretending to be the casting director of Zeffirelli’s next movie about Maria Callas. When he discovers the truth, Fabietto’s father urges his wife to tell the poor woman it was a joke. In a fit of rage, Graziella tells the family that Neapolitans are mean and ill-spirited.
The scene is set in the memorable wooden kitchen, with small details recalling the atmosphere of a mountain cabin. Graziella is so proud of her origins that she recreates the atmosphere of Trentino Alto Adige traditional houses in Naples. Fabietto tries to steal a canaderlo - a typical Alto Adige food - from a plate, but Graziella stops him.
Trentino Alto Adige is a northeastern region of Italy which borders Switzerland and Austria. The stereotypical image of the local population is one that's based on the huge influence that German and Austrian culture have played there. In this part of Italy, everyone speaks German as a second language. Alto Adige’s local culture and folklore are very, very different from Naples one: Sorrentino tries to capture the strangeness of this Alto Adige’s microcosm in an apartment building in Naples.
I hope you've found all this interesting. If you have any other questions about the film, leave them in the comments and I'll try to help you with any of the Italian mysteries of the movies.
Reader Comments (11)
I'm sorry but I think, it is the weakest, I've ever seen to Sorrentino (I liked "Loro" better!). I felt he was too influenced by Fellini and forgot to make his own film, about his own personal story. I shrugged at so many points...
"Sorrentino has said that many actresses refused the role, embarrassed by the prospect of this very scene."
That seems so odd to me. It just seems like the kind of role and kind of scene actors would kill to do. It's not like he made the actress appear nude, and it's such a great scene. (I kind of understand the teen actor being hesitant, of course.)
Thanks so much for this, Elisa. A really informative read and it deepens my appreciation for Sorrentino's film. I hope the film gets nominated.
I really loved this film. Particularly the use of the Pino Daniele song - it was just beautiful.
This was an enlightening read. Thank you so much, Elisa.
That being said, I'm not sure understanding THE HAND OF GOD makes me like it any better. At least, the production design is marvelous, I'll give you that :)
Grazie mile! Neapolitan culture is fascinating. I saw Servillo on stage playing De Filippo and I had such fun.
Loved the production desing and the costumes. One of the few movies set in the 80 were the actors don't look like they're in a sketch.
Which half of the movie do you prefer? I had this discussion with friends. Everyone preferred the first half except me.
@Peggy Sue
Fascinating question. The first half is heartwarming and uplifting, but probably I would say the second one. It is sad and heartbreaking, yet it felt like the key to understanding the core of Sorrentino's cinema and life.
We're on the same page.
I really enjoyed the movie... and appreciate so much more even... after reading your piece. Thank you.
This article is invaluable, and The Hand of God is my favorite film of 2021.
This is AMAZING, Elisa...thank you!
Peggy Sue - I didn't love one half more than the other, but I didn't like the sequence with Capuano. It felt too...meta? self-referential? even for a film that is all about Sorrentino.
I did love the reappearance of the little monk at the end.