In “The Hand of God,” the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino conjures memories of his formative years in picturesque Naples. Capturing both the sun-dappled summer days he passed in the company of his larger-than-life family and the profound tragedy that set him on a path toward filmmaking, this partly autobiographical drama focuses on Fabio Schisa (Filippo Scotti), a teenager growing up in southern Italy during the 1980s.
Both indulgent and incisive in its evocation of youth, “The Hand of God” departs from the baroque, cynically detached tone of Sorrentino’s best-known works. Currently, an Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, the Netflix release displays a more aesthetically restrained side of a director often discussed as a career sensualist, and whose opus “The Great Beauty” won in the same Oscar category back in 2013.
That earlier movie’s decadent, disillusioned tour of Rome in its Berlusconi era exposed a certain spiritual emptiness beneath the eternal city’s extravagant surfaces, following an aged hedonist (Sorrentino mainstay Toni Servillo, who also co-stars in “The Hand of God”) for whom the party was almost over. “The Great Beauty” celebrated the beautiful and damned in sumptuous, satirical fashion; though hailed as Sorrentino’s masterpiece, it was not his final word on the subject, given his gaudily grotesque two-movie biopic “Loro” and similarly maximalist HBO series “The Young Pope” (continued as “The New Pope”).
“The Hand of God” — which steers closer to the rueful “Youth” he made directly after “The Great Beauty” — feels like a more personal outing for Sorrentino, dispensing with the ironic distance of his past projects in order to more fully embody the experiences that signified his coming of age. Often, that means exalting the women he adored, from his prankish, orange-juggling mother (Teresa Saponangelo) to his gorgeous, troubled aunt (Luisa Rainieri) who sunbathed in the nude. Elsewhere, it means reliving his obsession with Argentine football star Diego Maradona, who was rumored to join SSC Napoli and whose legendary first goal against England in the 1986 World Cup is referenced by the film’s title.
Enshrining these moments of effervescent pleasure he recalls, Sorrentino depicts as well the pain and anguish that marked his adolescence; the central tragedy of his youth arrives almost exactly at the film’s midpoint. In this way, the sustained reminiscence of “The Hand of God” immortalizes the memories that Sorrentino treasures while also allowing him an opportunity to make meaning from loss.
Opulent portraits of people and places, Sorrentino’s films have been deeply inspired by those of the great Italian maestro Federico Fellini. If “The Great Beauty” paralleled “La Dolce Vita” in unraveling Rome’s grand paradoxes and “Youth” channeled the wistful, existential-artistic conflict of “8 ½,” the filmmaker says that another Fellini picture — “Amarcord” — inspired “The Hand of God.”
Ahead of the Oscars, Sorrentino spoke with The Playlist about allowing memories to guide his latest film, laughing through tragedy, and being entranced by contradiction.
I understand that you’re speaking to me from Los Angeles, where you’ve been conducting interviews for “The Hand of God.” Congratulations on the Oscar nomination.
Thank you. It’s always a great honor to be nominated among so many movies. It’s absolutely fantastic. I’m very happy about that. I love to come to LA, so I’m happy that I have a reason to come. I love it because the weather is wonderful. I like this mood, like an eternal holiday. I’d love it if I could stay here.
You set “The Hand of God” in your native Naples. You open with an aerial tracking shot that moves in from the sea, but the film is more often fixed in place with Fabietto, experiencing the city as he does. How did you approach the challenge of capturing the essence of this place?
The only principle I had in order to feel Naples and to shoot Naples was to follow my memories about the city where I grew up. I have chosen the places where I grew up, and that was the only way. Capri, my house, so many places in the islands… These were places where I spent holidays when I was young and where I sometimes spend holidays today as well. I didn’t have a specific idea of the city that I had to show other than my memories, and so the beauty of the city is filtered by the beauty that a boy of a few years was able to see and embrace.
Returning to Naples to make “The Hand of God,” do you see the city differently now than you did back then?
The city has not changed too much. The problem is that I have changed. It’s a schizophrenic idea of the city because I went back to Naples now last year when I was 50 years old and I saw the city with the eyes of when I was 17 years old. But my mind and my life have changed. There is a kind of dissociation there.
Many of your films explore an interplay between the sacred and the profane. Though “The Hand of God” is more visually restrained than “The Great Beauty” and “Loro,” you still create these magical images of fallen chandeliers in ruined mansions, trapeze artists in the piazza, fireworks in the night sky, and so on. From where does that interest stem for you?
The sacred and profane are strong characteristics of my city, and part of Italy as well. In my city, above all, it’s very easy to find everywhere this mix between two things. Vulgarity can keep inside itself this weird and unexpected beauty. I love the contradictions. I think that the contradictions are a producer of beauty. It’s something that brings [a sense] of the absurd and an exceptional reality that I love to show in the movies.
That exceptional reality, in your past films, has been observed from more of a distance than “The Hand of God,” one could say. Making a film drawn from your own memories, did that proximity change the way you approached depicting beauty and vulgarity?
In “The Hand of God,” there was not a distinct change completely because, for about the first half of the movie, the main character is an observer of his life, of his family, of his relatives. In the second part, of course, he is not able anymore to observe the reality, because he’s overwhelmed by the pain of the reality that he’s living. I simply followed the memories of my feelings and the memories of the things that remained in my mind over the years, because of course, there are some things you forget and some things you remember. So I simply followed my memory, I have to say.
What do you remember of your emotions while writing the film and following your memories in that sense?
I wrote the movie before the lockdown, but then I was not sure that I was ready to do the movie. So I put the script away. And, during the pandemic, there were the conditions to do this movie. I realized that I was mostly thinking about this movie so I decided to go for it. For unconscious reasons, it was in my mind the right moment to do it. It was a strange [one] to write because I put on the paper my memories and not my ideas. For other movies, of course, I looked for ideas and for connections. In this case, that approach was completely different. It was a personal “Amarcord” in my mind, and I tried to put it together using some simple things that the dramaturgical rules gave me an opportunity to realize.
Visually, how did that approach of working from memories rather than ideas influence the look of the film and the style in which you chose to direct it?
Every movie dictates to you how to shoot it. So, the movies I did before, I was sure that the right way to shoot that kind of movie was the way that I used. In this case, the simplicity of the story, the reality of the family, and the honest feelings of that character imposed a very simple style, something that was unusual for me. It was the first time that I did a movie without thinking about the style of the mise en scène. And it was something that I was not used to doing, but this was the right movie to try to do something different on.
You have been acclaimed at multiple points throughout your career for the decadence of your mise en scène. What draws you to lavishness as a filmmaker?
Maybe it was something that I read when I was very young, in a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre, that the man needs to be shocked. I was pretty sure that it was a good idea to try to shock an audience. And my way of shocking an audience was not to be provocative or to shock them out of ethical reasons, but it was through a mise en scène that tried to put together things very distant from each other, like grandiosity and vulgarity, like beauty and sadness. I am attracted to these kinds of opposites that I know a way to put on the stage. When we do this work, everybody does what he feels that he’s able to do, and I do the same.
Many of your protagonists have been older men in a state of crisis, who are stunted in some existential way. Fabietto is much younger and still developing a sense of his own identity; you’ve also spoken about him representing yourself at that age. What was your approach to casting that character?
I am always looking for good actors, and I am always looking for people that I feel through auditions that I can have a good relationship, a comfortable relationship, a fan relationship with. Otherwise, if I don’t find something that we love about each other, it’s very hard for me to work with an actor. About the character in “The Hand of God,” it was new because I always put on the screen adults — maybe because I was younger, so I was very curious about the future that was waiting for me. And now that I am an adult, I am very curious about what I was. I’ve started to forget what I was, and so I am very curious about young people. This is one of the reasons why I did the movie about a young boy.
You have previously said, “Reality is just the starting point for a story. It has to be reinvented. Here in Naples, we have a fun way of reinventing memories.” Given the autobiographical elements of “The Hand of God,” how did you approach that process of deciding which memories to reinvent and which to perhaps preserve more exactly?
I tried to be closer to reality, and sometimes reality is not something that’s worthwhile to shoot. So, in that case, I try — without changing the feelings — to change the movements of the scenes, in order to realize something that can be interesting to me as an audience member, not as a part of that story.
You capture this family in a moment in time and include scenes of the characters being quite cruel to each other, as only family can be. What was it like to shoot the funnier scenes in “The Hand of God,” to find the comic timing in these characters interacting?
It was easy because I had a wonderful cast that is full of actors that are able to make me laugh. It was pretty easy. I should say that the laughter, the humor, is always another side of the tragedy. If we laugh, it is mostly because we are trying to hide the tragedy. And, so in this case, given the tragedy that was at the center of the movie, [the comedy] was helpful in order to build the family scenes.
I was moved by the sequence between Fabietto and the director Antonio Capuano near the end of ”The Hand of God.” The heightened, existential nature of their back-and-forth — about his ambition to make art and the role pain might play within that — feels poignant given the significance we sense it holds both to Fabietto and to you as a filmmaker.
I had this idea that it was the most important scene, at the end of the movie. I thought that it was a good idea to do that scene because I used to walk a lot with the real Capuano. In the old days, we strolled all the time. And so I decided to do the same in this movie. I was lucky because I found places that I didn’t know, like that cave in Naples close to the sea. That scene was like, in the Western movies, when there is a showdown about the situation that this young boy is living in. Suddenly, there is somebody who — inside the disorder and in a messy way — explains how to live.
“The Hand of God” is now streaming on Netflix.