The director has rediscovered his voice working again with actor Toni Servillo, who plays a president looking back on a career of empty rectitude
P
aolo Sorrentino has rediscovered his voice, his wan humour and his flair for the surreal and sensational set piece; this wintry, elegant movie is a welcome reassertion of his natural style after the facile and weirdly humourless affectations of his previous, very disappointing film Parthenope. It is a dry comedy of grief and regret which wears its dreamy melancholy and ennui like a well-tailored if fussily old-fashioned suit, and it returns Sorrentino to the various mysterious tableaux of political power that recurred in Il Divo from 2009, about political mandarin Giulio Andreotti, and his 2013 film The Great Beauty about a dissolute journalist and hedonist bidding a bittersweet farewell to everything he holds dear.
And above everything else, Grazia returns Sorrentino to the star of those films, 66-year-old Toni Servillo, his male muse and alter ego, an actor able to suggest fathomless depths of sadness or lenient humour with a single smile. (Oddly, that last film Parthenope assigned the Servillo-esque role of the knowing outsider to Gary Oldman, who had to play a bafflingly supercilious version of the author John Cheever.) Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.
