“Bureaucracy is meant to be slow,” Italy’s president (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. “That’s the point: to give people time to reflect.” But how much time is too much, and what benefit is reflection for a slippery anchor politician with six months left in his last term and a seemingly clinical inability to make some difficult choices before leaving his office?
As far as we can say at the beginning of Paolo SorrentinoUncharacteristically soothing and sexless ”Grace“Which feels like forced Catholic fines for the Napolitan meat parade from last year’s poorly received”Parthenop,” reflection is just about the only thing the unnamed President has done for most of the last seven years. A widowed jurist whose even-keeled — or completely dormant — personality convinced the people of Italy that he was the right man to rescue them from an economic crisis of some kind, the President bored the problem Into Submission Pretty Fast, and Has Spent the Rest of His Residency at the Quirinal Staring Into the Middle Distance and Thinking About His Dead Wife, Aurora.
The guy is so walled up in his own head that his nickname around the palace is “reinforced concrete.” In fact, our dear leader is so oppressed by political responsibility – so weighted by the question of how and why one should live without love in his life – that he doesn’t even know that he have A nickname around the palace.
But a storm will wake up its subconscious, and it arrives on several fronts at once. President’s daughter and chief advisor Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) hopes that her father will sign a law that allows euthanasia despite the protests from the Pope, his potential successor UGO (Massimo Venturiello) urges him to forgive a woman to kill his abuse despite he had a guilty, and his close friend Coco (Milvia (Milvia (Milmilvia (Milvia (Milvia (Mil. Milvia (Milvia Milvia (Milvia (Milvia. That her sign refuses to reveal the identity of Aurora’s lovers. It is enough to give the old man an existential crisis, as he is soon to be the element of the weak tension that is endemic to so many of Sorrentino’s films: that between the Holy and the Profane.
In “The Great Beauty” (in addition to several of the director’s other films, including this to one degree), that tension was explored by slimming the past in the present in the light of an eternal city. With its acting personal ”God’s hand,“Sorrentino again applied the same attitude to the relationship between reality and imagination and to the sensitive balancing act to keep a foot planted in each kingdom.” La Grazia “puts a more introspective spin on the same formula, its focus concentrated on incongruities that can be formed in the constantly defining gap between a man’s principle and his doubt. film (A deliberate curve ball from modern Italian cinema’s most unlimited maximalist), that gap seems to be expanded further behind the camera than on the screen – and in much more compelling way.
Sorrentino Can’t Resist the Temptation to Introduce A Few Garish Flourishes-Along with the Occasional I of Proustian Techno, and a Third Rap About “Metal Gear Solid”-Into this Otherwise Colorless Portrait of a Colorless Man, Confine, But His His His His Depok His DeCith Hallways, and Gardens of the Quirinine Feels Like An Act of self-denial from an artist who no longer trusts in the truth of his palette. So tight according to the director’s usual standards that it seems practically Bressonian compared to “I wonder what life is like for an insanely hot woman?” Excess “Parthenope”, Sorrentino’s latest, is the work with someone immobilized by the link between their ethos and their aesthetics; Someone who has spent their entire life in search of a truth that has just slipped out of their fingers and is of course sympathy for the pressure that comes with trying to rediscover it in the public eye.
“La Grazia” also strives to make us sympathy for them. The president is a stupid drill, but Servillo’s performance is always a hair that is less Moribund than the film around it and is kept by the sincerity of his ambivalence. The president is open and closed to everything at once; He listens to vacant gossip with the same curiosity as he entertains serious advice from the Pope, and he is as deeply confused by a pass from the beautiful Italian Vogue editor as he is of life-or-death in the pardon he is asked to consider. He is spite but open-hearted-covered by a force so enormous force that he can hardly move under the weight of it. He is, as someone expresses, which suffers from the “sensitivity burden” as lawyers and soldiers hopes that law and duty will spare them from having to continue their shoulders.
Servillo serves the ease of his character with a gentleness that can make it tender and touching to see the president get his track back, but “La Grazia” is struggling to support his leading man. Shipped with Sorrentino’s usual symbolism, which is clumsy and more suffocating than ever in connection with a movie that is so claustrophob (RIP to Elvis Racehorse, which dies in pain as a result of the president’s decision on mercy murder), the film is at one time both for vagans and for predictive in its front.
Sorrentino leads the character on a long and winding path towards being in peace with uncertainty, but the signs are equally clear in their intention because they are confusing in their contentWith the basic judgments that depend on the story that represents a kind of banality that has been missing from the glossiest of the director’s previous work. In the more exuberant films, many of them blasted a horny so in -depth that it was rightly incomprehensible from things of history and religion, that gloridity could be more a function than a mistake. Here, in an air -free drama whose protagonist has long been immune to such entertainment, and who occupies his lavish Roman palace as if he were a prisoner in need of a pardon himself, Sorrentino tries to look for the same tension in gray sky, wounded egos and legal debates.
He can’t find it. Style has always been the vehicle for his substance, and although it is easy to imagine why an exaggerated mistake like “Parthenope” can inspire Sorrentino to stretch things for his next function, it is fun that the said function proved to be the story of a man who threatens to discover from himself doubt. Maybe bureaucracy is It is thought to be slow enough for people to have time to reflect on the content of the issues that exist, but a Paolo Sorrentino movie is not. I suspect he did “La Grazia” to prove it to himself. It is the only point that gets stuck.
Rating: c
“La Grazia” premiered in the competition at 2025 Venice Film festival. Mubi will distribute it in the United States.
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