Was cinema this retrospective before lockdown, or was it that lockdown forced everyone to look backwards and inwards because we didn't know what we had to look forward to? Kenneth Branagh's boyhood reminiscence Belfast and Paul Thomas Anderson's coming-of-age romp Licorice Pizza await us; this week we have The Hand of God, which finds Paolo Sorrentino throwing back to his own mid-Eighties adolescence in sunkissed Naples. For the director's onscreen surrogate Fabietto (new Chalamet-in-waiting Filippo Scotti), it's a moment of immense promise, not least as the greatest footballer on the planet - Diego Armando Maradona - was heading this way after his time at Barcelona. (It's possible Sorrentino's memory was triggered by the exceptional archive footage in Asif Kapadia's recent Diego Maradona, which focused on this period.) For the filmmaker, it might appear a prime opportunity to make his own Amarcord, an earlier saga of adolescent longing and bosomy women, yet the leisurely opening pan around the Bay of Naples establishes Sorrentino's desire to stretch out in every direction - to tick off every Fellini movie in two hours with the assistance of Netflix money. This camera often drifts off beyond the speakers at the end of their dialogue; scenes that start in one place are often hijacked and rerouted elsewhere. What this director did for Rome in The Great Beauty, he now does for his birthplace, reframing Naples as a vast stage across which scurry eccentric relatives and the film folk who would make up Sorrentino's second family; cigarette smugglers and the most expensive footballer in Christendom; bats, boobs and Baronesses. "Looking is all I know how to do," shrugs Fabietto, indirectly nailing down the strengths and limitations of the Sorrentino filmography. In the lad's defence, there was clearly a lot to look at. Faced with a world as well-stocked and wondrous as that The Hand of God puts on screen, how could you not want to pick up a camera and start recording?
The Sorrentino we rejoin here is cuddlier and more approachable than the tyro who gave us 2018's bilious Loro. That he's sailing into crowdpleasing waters is immediately evident from the decision to recall his favourite actor, the great Toni Servillo, not as the kind of oddbod/predator/cold fish he's traditionally played under the eye of this director, but as Fabietto's father Saviero, a pipe-smoking, worldly charmer who has some very Italian ideas about the opposite sex, but proves loving and supportive, and snaffles most of the funny lines. (Saviero uses a billiard cue to change TV channels; asked why he hasn't forked out for a remote, he scoffs "Don't talk nonsense, I'm not a Communist".) Servillo's presence is also crucial as the film moves into more tender territory. When Fabietto goes to bed a teenager and wakes up an orphan - as, tragically, was the case in Sorrentino's own upbringing - we're obliged to note the importance of having drolly funny, rocksolid individuals like Saviero and his wife Maria (Teresa Saponangelo) around. We miss them when they're gone. This is new for Sorrentino, who's previously appeared cool-to-standoffish behind the camera, too busy lining up his shots to much care about the emotions of the people passing through them. (A certain melancholy born of detachment was as good as it got.)
The Hand of God, by contrast, turns out lively-to-sentimental, describing first something that happened to this boy and then how he muddled through. No sooner has Fabietto attended his parents' funeral, he's being scooped up in a smuggler's speedboat and swept off to Stromboli; no sooner has he had his heart broken by the sight of his favourite actress in another man's arms, he's chasing after a director in the hope of learning something new. (The memory can be like a tap: open it just an inch, and it all comes flooding out.) If the prodigious movement involved means Sorrentino sacrifices a little of his trademark visual sheen, The Hand of God gains in depth; it's reflective in another way besides. In the final moments, shortly before leaving for Rome and the life his creator now leads, the young Sorrentino wanders his old neighbourhood, taking one last look at the people he first met and then left behind there; it's not the only sequence here where self-discovery intersects with self-justification, producing a rich subtext of this-is-why-I-do-what-I-do. This is the kind of film a director makes to compensate for the one thing they weren't able to see properly in their younger days - or because there are people they can no longer look at. That's why we continue to look back, and why those looking back continue to turn to the cinema, which has always been rather good at converting absence into presence.
The Hand of God opens in selected cinemas today, and will be available to stream on Netflix from December 15.
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