Writer and Director: Paolo Sorrentino
After the sprawling Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino is back on top form. His beautiful new film charting the last days in office of an Italian President is a tender reflection on old age, responsibility and forgiveness. Working again with the peerless Toni Servillo, who shone so luminously in 2013’s The Great Beauty, Sorrentino’s latest film is one of his best.
The Great Beauty won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and there are echoes of its narrative in La Grazia. In the former, Servillo’s character in his 65th year only finds absurdity on his journey to find the truth. There is soul-searching in La Grazia, too, but in this case, rather than uncover what is true, the President needs to discover what is right. With only a few months left in his presidency, Servillo’s Mariano De Santis is faced with an unenviable dilemma: should he sign off on the Euthanasia Bill that his government has drawn up?
On a diet of quinoa and fish and limited to one cigarette a day by his daughter Dorotea, De Santis spends his last month in the Quirinal Palace thinking about his wife, who died before he became President. He misses her painfully. But another grief pains him, too. 40 years earlier, his wife slept with another man and jealousy bites at him, and its jaws won’t let go.
There’s also something of Sorrentino’s Sky TV series The Young Pope in his new film. The machinations of government and bureaucracy feature here, too. We even have a Pope, this one dreadlocked and bluntly honest, before he drives off on his motorbike. But whereas Sorrentino basked in the surreal in his TV show, in La Grazia he is more restrained, and there are hardly any other odd moments apart from the languid Pope.
That’s not to say that La Grazia isn’t filmed with careful verve, however. Each shot of Di Santis sitting alone on a Baroque sofa, listening to Italian Hip-Hop, is a minor masterpiece. Endless corridors are nicely juxtaposed with tiny cell-like rooms where an eager clerk works alone. There is one sequence depicting the arrival of a dignitary from Portugal that is almost as exciting as the pram scene from Battleship Potemkin, later recreated in The Untouchables. As the Portuguese politician struggles to keep his footing, De Santis asks his bodyguard, “Do I look as old as him?”
As well as the Euthanasia Bill, the President has the choice to pardon two convicted murderers. It’s his duty, as stipulated in the Italian constitution, which is written out at the start of the film as fighter jets strip the blue sky with streams of green, white and red. As a lawyer, he takes his obligations seriously and meticulously. He always needs more time to reflect, although to others it appears as prevarication. His methods have earned him the nickname “Reinforced Concrete”. Nevertheless, Servillo shows us signs of cracking.
Offsetting the moral dramas, Milvia Marigliano is hilarious as art critic Coco Valori, an old friend of De Santis. She talks a hundred miles an hour and wants to close down all the museums, if only the President would give her a job in the government. She comes for dinner, but leaves quickly once she’s greeted with the tiny sliver of fish that she’s presented with. Anna Ferzetti is Dorotea, who has a dual role. She has to look after her father, managing his health, and also as his aide, she tries to persuade him to agree to the Bill that she has prepared. She balances these two jobs well, never overstepping the mark when it comes to politics, neatly represented in one scene where a rug separates them as they talk about the duty of the law. Ferzetti gives Dorotea a serenity that is broken only by the slightest shades of exasperation.
With the question “who owns our days?’ often repeated, La Grazia is a unique meditation on life, politics and religion, and its brooding ideas and electronic score will linger long after the credits roll. Sorrentino’s film charts a man’s search for light and weightlessness. It may be the closest we can get to the complex and undefinable state of grace.
La Grazia is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
