Venice: Paolo Sorrentino returns with "The Grace"

by Elisa Giudici, reporting once again from Venice 

Toni Servillo stars in "The Grace". Image credit: Andrea Pirrello

For a director who has already devoted two films to real and controversial Italian prime ministers (Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi), two series to fictional popes, and one feature to the president of the Italian Republic (a largely ceremonial role compared to its French or American counterparts), La Grazia (The Grace) plays like a natural progression. Yet it still manages to surprise. What's particularly astonishing is how Sorrentino shot a €13 million production in some of Italy’s most symbolic locations for months—La Scala included, packed with extras—without a single leak...

The director indulges less than usual, and to good effect: for instance, he introduces a new fictional pope—Black and with dreadlocks—or has Toni Servillo, with surprising grace, rap a track by Gué Pequeno (one of the film’s Italian cameos), the very rapper who back in 2015 quipped, “Sorrentino couldn’t have done a better take” in the hit “Le bimbe piangono”. 

Now that the secrecy around the film has lifted, the result is unmistakably Italian (you could identify the locals in the audience simply by the volume of their laughter) and more institutional in tone than Il Divo or Loro. Here, Sorrentino isn’t out to expose or interpret Italian politics, whether for domestic or foreign viewers. Instead, he uses Rome’s settings and rituals to create an atmosphere that resonates perfectly with his aesthetic codes and cinematic language.

At its core, The Grace once again revolves around a formative adolescent love that reshapes a life. Unlike the leads of The Great Beauty or Parthenope, De Sanctis (Toni Servillo) actually marries the young woman he first glimpsed among the plum trees and vineyards of Piemonte. Now President of the Republic and a widower, nearing the end of his cautious, nicknamed “reinforced concrete” presidency, he is haunted by his wife’s final confession: decades earlier she admitted to an affair, but never revealed her lover’s name—condemning him to a lifelong search for the truth.

Like much of Sorrentino’s work, The Grace revisits his recurring obsessions: first love, death as the inescapable conclusion of every life, whether lived lavishly or modestly. Compared to Parthenope, however, it is lighter in tone and more accomplished. The “grace” of the title works on several levels: De Sanctis literally holds the power to grant pardons, weighing the pleas of two confessed murderers whose stories bring further reflections on love, which “makes fools of those who’ve never known it.” But grace is also “the beauty of doubt,” rediscovered by the jurist as his certainties collapse while revising a law on euthanasia.

A Catholic, though such a weary believer that he nods off while praying, De Sanctis embodies the quintessential Sorrentino protagonist: part self-portrait, part composite of his past creations, and partly modeled—though the director denies it—on Italy’s current president. What makes this film more effective than his recent work is the auteur's willingness to entertain, especially through the presence of a razor-sharp art critic who skewers De Sanctis with biting one-liners (“I confess that…,” “as the good Christian he is, he doesn’t speak, he confesses”), and a bodyguard who never fails to steal scenes.

Still, one question lingers: with its themes so deeply rooted in Italian politics and its constant nods to the recent history of the presidency, how compelling will it be for international audiences?