La Grazia reunites Toni Servillo with Paolo Sorrentino for the seventh time.
The film circles an Italian president nearing the end of his term.
La Grazia is now streaming on MUBI.
In La Grazia, his seventh collaboration with director Paolo Sorrentino, Toni Servillo essays a fictional president, Mariano De Santis, staring down the end of the road. Given that Sorrentino’s earlier film, Parthenope (2024), put his stylistic maximalism on overdrive, this feels like a reflex allergic response. All those typical showy indulgences of sweeping camera movements and operatic swells have been trimmed. The most muted of his outings, La Grazia views an autumnal phase with a pinch of resignation. The film opens just few months away from the close of Mariano’s tenure. Throughout his career, he has evaded controversy, flinching from provocative positions. Nicknamed ‘Reinforced Concrete,’ he has had public adoration waning to indifference. Yet, never has there been active hostility. He has waded through by sticking to a mild political tenor, always wary of buttons it mustn’t trigger. La Grazia tips that cautiousness as a philosophy that has long driven the president.
Mariano has left the bulk of overseeing petitions to his lawyer daughter, Dorothea (Anna Ferzetti). She argues and fine-tunes the specifics of pleas and pardons before he receives them. Central to the slim narrative is an euthanasia bill. But he tends to be dodgy, endlessly calling for revisions. Chafing at his passivity, she lambasts him for not having the will and daring to state a solid stance. Instead, Mariano wavers in dilemma. He skirts all issues without committing. As he himself puts it, he’ll be termed a murderer if he signs and a torturer if he refrains. His proximity, trusting relationship with the Pope also colours the quandary. To allow the bill passage would be to indicate a shakiness of Catholicism. Mariano seems hemmed in by fear of backlash from all quarters. It reins him in, foists him through reconsideration.
Sorrentino foregoes his typical dashing, extravagant flourishes for a sedate rhythm. Shorn of showiness, his filmmaking here leans on repose. We walk with Mariano down corridors of restlessness. Occasionally, Sorrentino does puncture a still scene with a burst of movement. When a senior dignitary is visiting Mariano, his entry is rendered in high drama, a wild billowing of carpet and rains. That the president is fond of rap becomes a perfect excuse for slamming in a bolt of anachronistic energy.
But La Grazia can turn too ponderous. It keeps circling the burden of responsibility upon Mariano. He’s on a quest of lightness. However, can he even remember what that ever felt like? All intense edges that could have jutted out in a president’s portrait are hacked out. The result is something almost too cold and detached.
Staid and introspective, La Grazia is about the long wait before decisions are made. Mariano is rigidly stoic but his wrestle with the euthanasia bill is palpable. Sorrentino weaves the entire film around Servillo’s face. As impenetrable it seems, we are constantly teased to read motives and moods behind an unflappable front. Is he incapable of feeling itself? Servillo, who won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, maintains a complex, artful balance of opacity and hints of Mariano’s hidden personhood. He is solemn and reserved, but can jest as well. Years of being a public face have forced his private self out of view. He wonders if he’s lonely. The faintest cracks in his composure happen mostly in agonising over his dead wife’s affair. He knows she cheated on him decades ago, but the name was never disclosed. He casts his suspicion on his friends, scanning the room at his wife’s memorial service. Neither does his closest friend, Coco Valori (Milvia Marigliano), let up the secret.
His soul is in unrest. Servillo isn’t interested in wheedling sympathy or thrust interest in a receding character. It’s a performance welded between observation, tentativeness and acceptance. Mariano holds bitterness and resentment which he’s too high-nosed to share. He believes he himself can work out the truth. This is enmeshed with uncertainties over the bill and pardons. La Grazia pivots around one big question Dorothea poses to her father: who owns our days? As long as Mariano waives off having to answer it, he’s aware a confrontation is inevitable. Sorrentino gestures placidly to the film’s titular grace blessed with beauty of doubt. La Grazia doesn’t have the spinning power of The Great Beauty (2013) but glows with serenity.
La Grazia is now streaming on MUBI.
