Movie review: The Hand of God is warm-hearted, quirky, tragic and humorous
Toni Servillo and Filippo Scotti. Pictures: Gianni Fiorito
★★★★☆
One of the great contemporary Italian directors, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God (15A) is an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Naples in the 1980s.
Teenager Fabietto Schiesa (Filippo Scotti) grows up in an unconventional family, with a prank-crazy mother Mari (Teresa Saponangela), a philandering father Saverio (Toni Servillo) and an older brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), who auditions for Fellini as he tries to become an actor.
And then there’s Fabietto’s foul-mouthed grandmother (Birte Berg), an impoverished Baroness (Betty Pedrazzi) who lives upstairs, and his Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), whose ongoing mental breakdown involves stripping naked at every opportunity.
A febrile bunch, to say the least of it: and then the Argentinean genius Diego Maradona joins S.C.C. Napoli, turning Naples into the centre of the footballing universe.
Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, The Hand of God — the title, of course, references Maradona’s infamous goal against England during the 1986 World Cup — is a charming bildungsroman, a series of vignettes in which Sorrentino pays homage to the place and people who formed him.
Reminiscent of Cinema Paradiso in its nostalgic tone and cinematically inspired narrative, the film is by turns warm-hearted, quirky, tragic and humorous, with Filippo Scotti a very likeable avatar for the young Sorrentino as he navigates the emotional and hormonal rollercoaster of his teenage years.
Cinematographer Dario D’Antonio fairly ravishes Naples with his cameras, capturing its crystal-clear light and romantic appeal with sun-drenched wide-angle shots, but also taking us deep into the city’s less salubrious quarters, where Fabietto discovers a world that is much darker and claustrophobic (and exciting) than his comfortably middle-class upbringing previously allowed.
Full of poetic flourishes, classical quotations and self-deprecatory acknowledgements of how callow youth can be, The Hand of God is a thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the artist as a young man.
(cinema release)
