Growing up is never easy to do, but it often makes for rich, expressive filmmaking. The Hand of God is Paolo Sorrentino’s memoir about his teenage years in Naples in the 1980s, about the enveloping embrace of family love, the numbing sharpness of grief, and the way pain is sometimes the thing that kickstarts ambition. Sorrentino—whose lush film The Great Beauty won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014—has always drawn inspiration, indirect or otherwise, from his forebear Federico Fellini, and this new film feels grazed by the spirit of Amarcord, Fellini’s blissful 1973 film about his own adolescence. But this is how art moves forward: one artist builds on the work of another, paying homage but also adding new layers. The Hand of God is a lovely film, occasionally oddball in the best way, and astute in the way it handles tragedy and loss.
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Sorrentino’s young stand-in here is Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a teenager with a mop of curly hair and a charmingly skewed smile. But the first person we meet in The Hand of God is his aunt, the luscious Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), as she stands in line at a bus stop in a filmy white dress. A man pulls up in a limo, claiming to be San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples; he tells her he can help her conceive a child, a dream that has eluded her. The scene that follows is fanciful and strange, charged more with the mystery of religious folklore than it is with sexuality. Regardless, when Patrizia returns home, her hotheaded husband (Massimiliano Gallo) believes she’s been up to no good and threatens to beat her. To the rescue come Fabietto and his mother, Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), and father, Saverio (Toni Servillo, of The Great Beauty). All three are perched on one small motorbike, laughing as they cling to one another. It’s one of those moments that triggers movie-watching synesthesia, conjuring the fresh strangeness of seaside air mingled with traces of motor exhaust.
Source : time
