After a Loro (2018) critically exhausted, Paolo Sorrentino, filmmaker of The great bellezza (Oscar for best foreign language film, 2014), returns with a masterful and largely autobiographical film. Exhilarating, as funny as it is tragic, God’s hand (È Stata la mano di Dio) is an ode to freedom, to family and to his hometown, Naples, through which the director pays homage to the greats of Italian cinema.
The evocation of a casting for Franco’s next film Zeffirelli allows Fabio’s mother to play a mean trick on her neighbor; in another jubilant scene, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), the older brother of Fabio (touching and nuanced Filippo Scotti, his first major role), will audition for the next Fellini film, whose style was already mentioned earlier in the film, during this theatrical family dinner where an aunt presents her new husband, a recurring source of gags.
This Neapolitan clan is made up of characters all larger than life. Let us think first of the grumpy old aunt who wears a fur coat in the middle of summer, or the upstairs neighbor, the old and mysterious baroness, who will help Fabietto “Fabio” Schisa, Sorrentino’s alter ego, in his passage, accelerated by tragedy, in adulthood. In the midst of this areopagus of colorful individuals, Fabio is the calmest and most introverted.
The lens through which we learn to discover the dynamics that animate each of these humans, united, beyond family or friendships, by what holds them back from fully existing – a chaotic marriage, an accumulated debt, links with the underworld, etc. At the end of this story (which runs out of steam in the last act, let’s agree), only Fabio will find how to free himself from his own chains.
The Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino said of his tenth feature film that it was the most personal of his work, and for good reason: the teenager Fabio, it is him, in the mid-1980s in Naples, period and city magnified by the eye of the director and his cinematographer, Daria d’Antonio. Like his character, the director was struck by a tragedy that made him orphan and from which he fortuitously escaped thanks to the football star Diego Maradona, hence the title evoking this famous goal scored with the fist against the English team. during the World Cup of that same year.
If Maradona’s presence is felt throughout the film (he only appears briefly in a small scene), she will serve as a kind of breadcrumb trail for the narrative. Likewise, the character of Aunt Patrizia (famous Luisa Ranieri) is central, although the majority of her scenes are not presented to us until the beginning of the film. She sums up with her own tragedy the main themes of Sorrentino’s story, starting with this need for freedom that social conventions prevent us from reaching. God’s hand will represent Italy in the Oscar race for best foreign language film.