The Hand of God – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Hand of God – first-look review

02 Sep 2021

Words by David Jenkins

Three people, a young man and two older adults, sitting together on a motorcycle at night.
Three people, a young man and two older adults, sitting together on a motorcycle at night.
Pao­lo Sor­renti­no gets per­son­al in this hit-and-miss tale of a world-famous foot­baller and a filmmaker’s cre­ative birth.

The term the hand of god” is syn­ony­mous with the moment in which prop­er naughty Argen­tin­ian foot­balling leg­end Diego Maradona cun­ning­ly nudged a goal in with his hand dur­ing the quar­ter finals of the 1986 World Cup against Eng­land – a moment read by many as karmic ret­ri­bu­tion for the Falk­lands War.

Ital­ian film­mak­er Pao­lo Sor­renti­no co-opts the term for this jol­ly cin­e­mat­ic bil­dungsro­man based on his own upbring­ing in Napoli dur­ing the 80s, where the hand of some divine force moves peo­ple like chess pieces around a giant board and fate deals its dai­ly sur­pris­es. And wouldn’t that be a nice alle­gor­i­cal way to describe the work of a film direc­tor as well?

Even though this is recog­nis­ably a work by Sor­renti­no, with its crisply ren­dered visu­als, swish­ing cam­era moves, iron­ic, fun-pok­ing humour and episod­ic struc­ture, he’s dis­pensed with the arch detach­ment of films like Il Divo and The Great Beau­ty and replaced it with a new­found earnest­ness that comes from his per­son­al con­nec­tion to the mate­r­i­al. It’s a lux­u­ri­ant and well-craft­ed film that brings a sense of spec­ta­cle to what is a sto­ry that’s inter­est­ed in the highs and lows of low-slung domes­tic liv­ing, though every moment that works is usu­al­ly trailed by one that doesn’t, mak­ing for frus­trat­ing­ly uneven viewing.

Group of people sitting on a wooden deck by a rocky coastline.

At the cen­tre of the film is Fil­ip­po Scot­ti as Fabi­et­to, a goofy teen with a Walk­man strapped to his belt who is our entry point into a world of fam­i­ly squab­bles and sport­ing obses­sion. Per­haps it’s out of mod­esty, or maybe a strict fideli­ty to the truth, but Sor­renti­no has cho­sen to write Fil­ip­po as a whol­ly unin­ter­est­ing and unen­gag­ing screen proxy – an intro­spec­tive wall­flower who objec­tive­ly observes the dra­mas of his life while sel­dom choos­ing to inter­act with them. This per­pet­u­al inex­pres­sive­ness just means that some of the big emo­tion­al beats don’t land as Sor­renti­no clear­ly intends them too.

The film tells of Fabietto’s fast-tracked road to matu­ri­ty as the result of a fam­i­ly tragedy, and how his ini­tial infat­u­a­tion with foot­ball is even­tu­al­ly dis­placed by a desire to become a film­mak­er. Sor­renti­no doesn’t fore­shad­ow this change by hint­ing at Fabietto’s cin­e­mat­ic eye or a love of film (in fact, he can’t muster the ener­gy to watch a sin­gle one), but more that he has gained knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence through his var­i­ous encoun­ters with in-laws, neigh­bours, pet­ty crim­i­nals and the age­ing old­er woman who lives down­stairs and offers him one major life les­son entire­ly gratis.

The film is at its most inter­est­ing when Sor­renti­no demon­strates the nos­tal­gic qual­i­ties of art, and how it can be used to recre­ate frag­ments of mem­o­ry that might be com­plete­ly sub­jec­tive in their mean­ing, but the very fact that they have not fad­ed through time boosts them with added pro­fun­di­ty. In one sequence, when Fabi­et­to is being giv­en the afore­men­tioned life les­son, there’s a very loud wash­ing machine whirring in the back­ground, which is a love­ly exam­ple of how these cru­cial expe­ri­ences lodge them­selves in the brain replete with sights, sounds, smells, tastes and phys­i­cal interactions.

Oth­er­wise, the film shoots for the deli­cious­ly grotesque and bawdy cross-cut of Ital­ian life as seen in Fed­eri­co Fellini’s 1973 film Ama­cord, but lands clos­er to the extreme sen­ti­men­tal­ism of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cin­e­ma Par­adiso. It ends up being a fair­ly clean com­bi­na­tion of the two. It’s hard not to see the bold­ness of Sorrentino’s approach to biog­ra­phy, but too much of it floun­ders for a rel­e­vance beyond the director’s own flighty reminisces.

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