Paolo Sorrentino
È stata la mano di Dio

“Do you have something to say? Schisa! Creativity and imagination are false myths that aren't worth a damn!”.

In a cave overlooking the Gulf of Naples, critic Capuano subjects the young beardless Fabietto Schisa to a relentless interrogation. The environmental suggestion, the rhetorical hyperboles of the boy, his naivety, collide with the harshness and essentiality of the mature man, the disillusionment of someone who has seen much more than three or four films. Lived much more than sixteen, however tragic, years. This is how Sorrentino’s latest debated work closes, which perhaps many hate precisely for those flourishes and that creativity (not always matched by as much content, according to detractors) which the master makes sure to censor right from the start.

It's quite a short circuit, to be honest. Because this film, which greatly reduces the director's aesthetic arsenal in favor of a more streamlined autobiographical approach, has not been exempt from the usual criticisms and accusations of arrogance, as if it were a convoluted and intellectual work. But have the hordes of Sorrentino’s enemies really watched this movie? I wonder because you certainly don’t need to reach the finale with Capuano’s warnings to grasp the touching simplicity with which the director narrates, reveals the miseries of his youth, and the joys, the excitement of a boy, the smiles, the neuroses, the disappointments, the death. The initiatory rite of the old baroness who shows him the "cleavage" and makes him penetrate it, like one of those monstrous older women of Fellini.

So here we go, down to comparisons with Amarcord, mockery, merciless comparisons. The gallery of jesters that colors Sorrentino's narrative may well be Felliniesque, but they shine with authenticity, even in the probable artistic emphasis. Authentic because too absurd to be invented. From Aunt Patrizia, an erotic animal out of herself ("mad and whore") to Mrs. Gentile who spits truth into anyone’s face, and amidst the much less caricatured figures of the father and mother, adorable and suffering, forced to live with their mistakes and horrors. Terribly human and fragile.

I can only welcome such narration with an open heart, there can be no prejudice in front of the passionate story of one’s life, even when it focuses a bit on football and pussy. That’s how it should be, that’s normal. I really find no reasons to reject the gaze of an author who turns to his past in search of what led him to become what he is.

Perhaps, unlike elsewhere, it is precisely the adherence to reality that slightly plays against the overall richness of the film. Not all the events are memorable, there are empty passages, silences, or uneloquent dialogues, but I feel like forgiving them. Precisely in the name of that authenticity that shapes the entire work. Sorrentino has no fear of showing his reality in its pure form, without filters or censorship, people speak their true language, there is no artificial ennoblement; the speeches are what they are, football, Maradona, the pussy. That’s enough and more, because in each of the characters the themes reverberate differently: the splendid mother captures the human side of the fan, Uncle Alfredo a bit of a philosopher erects everything as a symbol. In short, there is a fine-tuned interpretation of human beings without inventing anything or embellishing a life that was and is also made of much pettiness, much mediocrity, of true or false myths, generosity, or deceit, of ignorance and dreams.

This is precisely the uncommon merit of the film: even through a substantially realistic narrative, it also draws many ideal plots, creating a social and family portrait that gives away nothing but is not ruthless for it, but rather full of that dignity which characterizes those who are not ashamed of their origins, who lived a "poor" reality and did everything possible to ennoble it with their actions, but without falsifying or hiding it.

With this film, the pressing threat (the memory) of an oppressive reality and the dream of a beautiful and bright life like the cinema touch, reunite, without canceling each other out, living in magical balance.