Key points:
- In his new, semi-self-portraying film The Hand of God, the Italian auteur ponders a misfortune that torments him.
In his 20-year profession, Paolo Sorrentino has coordinated scenes of permanent virtuosity and glory: the display of the pope in the Vatican, poolside bashes where euphoria pills downpour from the sky, a giraffe among Roman vestiges, Michael Caine leading a field of cows. Yet, in his most recent, The Hand of God, Sorrentino stages a scene ostensibly more testing than any of them, and one that a couple of producers might at any point think about: a reenactment of his own folks’ demises.
At first, it seems, by all accounts, to be an image of homegrown happiness. Sorrentino’s fictionalized guardians (played by Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo) are partaking in an evening on the couch by the fire in their new occasion home, outside Naples. They begin to feel tired and calmly rest off in one another’s arms. It is just a short time later we understand they are being harmed via carbon monoxide exhaust from a broken warming framework. The 16-year-old Sorrentino was not with them that evening. His dad had gotten him a pass to see his football crew, Napoli, and their electrifying new star: Diego Maradona. “He’s the person who saved you!” An uncle tells the youthful Sorrentino at his folks’ memorial service.
As in the film, Sorrentino just discovered what had occurred after the match, by which time his folks were dead. “At the point when I went to the medical clinic, I understood that something was going on that was the main thing in my life,” he says over Zoom, as he smokes a cigarillo in his office in Rome. “I remember all that occurred.”
The actual misfortune is practically incredible; reproducing it 35 years after the fact, similarly so. How could he get past that scene? “It was amazingly troublesome,” he answers in a blend of English and Italian through a translator. “However, eventually, what wins are the exceptionally concrete and substantial issues of shooting a scene. You don’t need your group to be pausing or to raise hardships with your maker. You simply shoot it. You depend on the strategies that you learned throughout the long term and you put it all on the line.”
