‘La Grazia’ San Sebastian Review: Paolo Sorrentino’s Quiet Meditation on Power and Grace

The word “grace” carries different meanings depending on its use and context. “Reaching a state of grace” has a religious origin but has long been part of common vocabulary. Grace can also mean a legal pardon or act of clemency. It conveys lightness, humor, and was once used to ask someone’s name (“What is your grace?”). In Paolo Sorrentino’s film, it seems to encompass all of these, to the point that one could think the story is built around the title, as if it had been reverse-engineered from it.

How many things can we say about “grace”? Quite a few, actually. And in this film, the director of The Great Beauty attempts to embrace several of them in what I consider his most sober, sensitive, and understated work to date. Sorrentino has an evident temptation for excess and grandiosity, along with very specific, striking audiovisual choices. In La Grazia, these elements are still present but restrained, contained within a film that seeks lightness—this “grace”—in a subtler, less declamatory way than in much of his previous work.

This makes La Grazia less showy and exaggerated than other films of his, perhaps even more “boring” if one dares use that word here. But for a filmmaker who rarely resists drawing attention in one way or another, taking a small step back from his megaphone-like devices can be seen as a move in the right direction. And if that also makes the film more melancholic, calm, and—even slow—so be it. Cinema, after all, is not a Formula 1 race.

Toni Servillo plays Mariano De Santis, a fictional Italian president. In parliamentary democracies, presidents have a more secondary role in daily affairs than in other countries. Right from the start, with text overlaid on the screen, Sorrentino suggests that De Santis’ duties are formal receptions, ceremonial signings, appointments, and the like. Not all are minor, and the ones that concern him here become fundamental in understanding his personal journey throughout the story.

De Santis—a widower, about to leave office, on a strict diet controlled by his daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), and secretly nicknamed “reinforced concrete” (everyone knows it but no one says it)—is seemingly a calm, unassuming man: gray, firm, correct, boring, solid. He is well-treated by his staff and employees, and the public receives him politely, but he knows he is somewhat irrelevant. In La Grazia, he encounters situations that will allow him to question that definition.

He must decide on three petitions that challenge his ethical and political stances. A Christian Democrat, confronts a law to legalize euthanasia, which unsettles some of his convictions. The other two are pardons—acts of clemency, “graces”—for two people imprisoned for having killed their respective partners, each case complicated and unique. As he navigates these decisions, his retirement, and succession, Mariano reflects on his life. He misses his late wife, wonders whether she was faithful, tries to connect with his children (she helps him; he is a musician living in Canada), and gradually takes stock of his personal and professional life as he nears the end of his public service.

This is the landscape Sorrentino presents in La Grazia: a series of doubts, fears, and uncertainties of a man who perhaps always prioritized legality and correctness over personal and subjective concerns. Connecting to the film’s title, this is a person who does not seem to have reached a state of self-satisfaction, reproaching himself for actions, attitudes, and behaviors. It’s not that he wants to attain the so-called grace, but he wants to navigate this final stage of his life more lightly. Without the heavy burden, trauma, or weight.

A portrait of a powerful man—something Sorrentino often does—who is essentially a good person, La Grazia foregoes much of the audiovisual pyrotechnics. Beyond a certain affection for Italian hip-hop and some other colorfully Sorrentino-esque details, there are no major “magic tricks,” obsessive curiosities, or the director’s frequent fascination with female beauty, which often turns his films into twisted stories of dazzling muses. Here—even though the character harbors a particular attachment to his late wife—everything is handled from another emotional register: the grace to be reached does not come from eyes, smiles, or a woman’s figure, but from attaining acceptance of who one is and what one has done in life.

The film largely avoids the issues plaguing the real world. While De Santis is president, his obligations are specific and unrelated to international conflicts or major scandals. In fact, the most curious aspect of such a character is that he seems a survivor of an era when officials were gray, efficient, correct, and even unnoticed. Reality, however, seeps in through omission. By presenting De Santis soberly and even affectionately —Sorrentino previously made films about the flamboyant and problematic Silvio Berlusconi and Giulio Andreotti, both played by Servillo—, La Grazia offers a man whose greatest transgression consists of ordering a pizza when his diet prescribes quinoa. Not the lightest choice in the world, but one that, at least for a few moments, allows him to reach a state of foodie bliss.