You can confidently let yourself be sucked into a Mediterranean lifestyle here. Quite literally, when the camera is right at the beginning of Paolo Sorrentinos The hand of God Flying over the sea towards Naples: speedboats, seagulls and the city, which is elevated to a picturesque sculpture here, are presented in the glistening evening sun even more longingly.
Though cinema is not quite right, Sorrentino’s film is a Netflix production that has also been shown in selected cinemas since December 2nd and starts on the streamer on December 15th. Yet: The hand of God screams for the big screen, because as you know it from the Italian director, his latest work, which was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is teeming with wonderful images and cinematographic eccentricity. Like its more opulent La Grande Bellezza – The great beauty or his papal series spectacles The Young Pope and The New Pope with their elaborate choreographies is also The hand of God an audiovisual festival, which is a bit more modest in comparison.
With Sorrentino, more modest still means, of course, that it is colorful, loud and tragicomic. It is the modus operandi to approach your own story. Then The hand of God, which is advertised as his most personal work to date, is exactly that: a cinematic examination of his own past, with the attitude towards life of his youth in Naples in the 1980s. The hand of God has not become a well-behaved self-portrait, but an associative film full of gaps in which memory is formally inscribed.
We follow Sorrentino’s alter ego, Fabietto, to whom Filippo Scotti gives the aura of a quiet dreamer with nuanced play, through a plot that lives less from the forward movement than from the panorama that he opens up. A swirling and pulsing through the spotlights of a youth: Because the rumor gets around that Diego Maradona, “the best football player of all time”, as it is called in the film opening credits, could switch to the club of the working-class city, the whole of Naples trembles nervously with anticipation. Right in the middle of it all is football fan Fabietto with his family, a bunch of lovingly drawn eccentrics.
Family of originals
The father Saverio (Toni Servillo), a communist banker, loves his prank-playing wife Maria (Teresa Saponangelo) dearly, but still cheats on her; the sister is never seen because she is always in the bathroom; the adored aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), who suffers from childlessness, enjoys presenting herself bare-breasted; another old aunt swears and eats all day, and yet another relative has an elderly gentleman with a squeaky larynx voice assistant who is asking for her hand. That the acting ambitions of Fabietto’s brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) are torpedoed because Federico Fellini tells him during an audition that he looks like a waiter, fits. Sorrentino’s entire oeuvre is known to pay homage to “il Maestro”.
In any case, the joy with which the director draws his ensemble, for example at a crazy family celebration, can be felt in every second of the film. The fact that the Italians also show the crude and often tasteless humor of everyday life ensures the entertainment factor emanating from the clan. But Sorrentino also masters the nuances: A highlight in this regard is Fabietto’s defloration by the baroness from above, in which a hairbrush, which is not only used in the head of the elderly woman, and the power of the imagination play a major role.
In general, the power of imagination is an important factor in the film. Right at the beginning a dwarf monk wants to cure the aunt’s sterility. A pipe dream of the mentally unstable woman? What looks like it is even exaggerated in the end. Also told The hand of God self-mythologically about how Sorrentino might have come to film. He wanted to make films in order to escape the unbearable reality, explains Fabietto to a director whom he had previously observed while filming in the pompous Galleria Umberto I.
The eponymous Hand of God plays a doubly charged role in the film: on the one hand, as the famous moment in which Maradona put the ball into the English goal with his hand in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup, seen in the film on a flickering tube TV. And on the other hand, as Fabietto’s luck, because the boy would rather see his sports idol, who is switching to the local soccer club SSC Napoli, at the game, he does not go to the country house where a tragedy occurs. Sorrentino said in various interviews that football and Diego Maradona saved his life.
What is now true in this film, i.e. what the director actually experienced, does not really matter. Rather is The hand of God a film that plays with exactly that: with the cinematic exaggeration of one’s own memory, and with the fact that life and fantasy can condition and stimulate one another. Sorrentino succeeds in making a film full of fairytale warmth, a shimmering, beautiful and sad coming-of-age tale between Italian heat, Neapolitan temperament and football.
The hand of God Paolo Sorrentino Italy 2021, 130 minutes
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