“The Hand of God” in cinemas and on Netflix: Once Upon a Time in Naples – Culture

This is the story of a boy and his city. Because this city is not just any city, but Naples, it pushes itself to the fore most of the time: colorful and theatrical, megalomaniac and forever beaten, noble and degenerate as it is now.

The impact of Naples can be seen, for example, when the people in the Arenella district are watching the World Cup and have all put their televisions outside on the summer balconies in June 1986. And then Diego Maradona, currently their patron saint and favorite and local hero, stretches his hand God’s in the sky of Mexico, and the ball is in goal. The whole street trembles with pleasure and triumph and glee.

But that’s not all, because in the brother-in-law’s apartment, where everyone is watching the game, the carabinieri ring the doorbell at that very moment. “The game is over,” they say, telling the man that he has to go to jail for corruption, which everyone always knew that one day it would happen. While he meekly packs his things, Maradona puts down his sixty-meter run, the street shakes again, and then everyone looks from their balconies as the criminal is forced into the police car and driven away, and in the background the sea and the island glow ultra-blue Capri.

The director was orphaned when he was only 16 years old, the parents suffocated in a fire

But that’s not all, because the brother-in-law is hardly gone when all eyes are on his bad-tempered and nasty and tourette-like “Affanculo” roaring mother, Signora Gentile, who always wears a fur coat even in midsummer, her proudest possession stolen by her son . And then this woman, who is hated by everyone, actually blames her relatives for the matter, whereupon she is brought to the ground and beaten and kicked like with the hooligans. Men, women and children are enthusiastic about it.

And now let’s be honest: How is an artist who has decided to tell the story of his early years and his becoming an artist, actually a quiet and tragic story, to compete with such a city? Against such a relationship? Against such a cauldron of condensed emotions and corruption and events and expansive personalities and crazy people and freaks? No chance, Paolo Sorrentino may have thought when the film “È stata la mano di Dio / The Hand Of God” began to take shape in his head.

And so it was clear that the city and its people would play the main role, as it were as a collective, that he would celebrate and adore and exaggerate and narrate everything even more densely than it already was, while the curly young man named Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), who experiences all of this and who of course is himself, often just stands by in amazement and can’t get his mouth shut and doesn’t know what is happening to him. A story of growing up, in which the hero hardly develops his own drive for a long time, but soaks up everything in his environment.

Maybe this Paolo Sorrentino really had to become something in the world before he could approach his hometown again in this way. Had to win the Oscar for “La Grande Bellezza”, which is not about Naples, but about Rome, a place of petrified beauty and eternity and decadence, but marked by a fatal heart muscle weakness, an all-embracing feeling of futility. Had to rhyme with phenomena like Giulio Andreotti (“Il Divo”) or Silvio Berlusconi (“Loro”) and even the Pope (“The Young Pope”), in quite spectacular, loud and surreal images, to finally close to return to the quiet boy he once was.

It is clearly his most important and personal story. We have to talk about that now, which inevitably leads to spoilers and betrayal of secrets, anyone who is allergic should get out here. As has long been known, Sorrentino was orphaned at the age of sixteen. You have to think of that when you see his lovingly drawn mother Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), who holds the family together with stoic patience and generosity.

She has a tendency to elaborate, insidious pranks, at which she can almost laugh herself to death when the snooty neighbor or her husband fall into the trap. Even the father Saverio (Toni Servillo), albeit full of weaknesses, appears in a friendly light – the beloved, with whom he has a child, remains outside the picture, she is overcome, the parents move back together. “We are communists,” his father always says, you can see him driving a Vespa, and only in one scene do you realize that he is actually the director of a bank.

Sorrentino says he owes his life to Diego Maradona – and that’s more than a metaphor

It is as contradictory and puzzling as life sometimes happens, and you can already tell from this how close Sorrentino is to its own story. And so comes the day in April 1987 when the parents set off for skiing in the mountains, to their holiday home in Abruzzo, but Fabietto doesn’t come with them because he doesn’t want to miss the SSC Napoli game against Empoli. The fact that Diego Maradano came to Naples as if by a providential miracle not only gave the whole city a tremendous boost, it also gave Fabietto a very personal boost. He never misses a game. And so he survives while his parents tragically suffocate in front of a log fire from which carbon monoxide gushes imperceptibly.

When Sorrentino often says that he owes his life to Maradona, it is more than a metaphor. Even in his Oscar speech sent a greeting to the great footballer. But to make the death of the parents the focus of his film, with all the aimlessness and despair that grips the young hero afterwards, that is something else again. Because now it is the city with its expansive personalities that of course lives on and rumbles and doesn’t just let Fabietto sink into grief. In this way, the film is also saved – from becoming one of those cinematic biographies with clenched teeth, full of heroic overcoming of suffering.

There is the cigarette smuggler who can outmaneuver the water police like no other with his fast motorboat and who will soon end up in prison. But now he is taking Fabietto on a nocturnal jaunt to Capri, where none of the rich and famous is awake, which is why they then go for a swim in the blue grotto. And there is the widowed, sarcastic, quickly bored Baronessa from the fifth floor, probably well over sixty, who one evening decides that it will be her who initiates the grieving Fabietto into love. And so it happens.

Everything happens about the way you imagine an Italian boy growing up, only in the details then again completely different. This is particularly noticeable when Fabietto sees a young actress as an onlooker while filming, incredibly beautiful and sensual. She doesn’t have a role yet, but she’d like to lure the director of the film off the set and into the theater where she’s playing. Instead, however, Fabietto comes, falls in love with her from afar and becomes a quiet regular. Do you have any idea what will happen then?

Of course, you are just mistaken. Because when the director really shows up, he gets up in the middle of the scene and scolds how ridiculously talented the beautiful woman is, makes her cry and blows up the whole performance. And what is Fabietto doing? He forgets his infatuation on the spot and follows this man of sharp and clear judgments. It is the very real director Antonio Capuano who gained fame in the 1990s with radical films about the youth of Naples (“Vito and the others”, “Pianese Nunzio – 14 in May”) and who then actually became a mentor for Sorrentino. He also wrote his first screenplay for Capuano.

This beautiful cinematic autobiography ends before that, but one thing is clear – the protagonist will become a director and mature into Paolo Sorrentino. A path on which the balance of power between the boy and his city is ultimately reversed. Because Naples with all the expansive personalities and crazy people and freaks, from the “Affanculo” roaring Signora Gentile to the affectionate Baronessa on the fifth floor, what remains of it? But nothing but wild, wonderful stories that inexorably disappear, just like the people who instigated them. And so the city must be grateful today for the quiet boy in its midst, who has become a great storyteller and who has forgotten nothing.

È stata la mano di Dio, IT 2021 – Direction and script: Paolo Sorrentino. Camera: Daria D’Antonio. Music: Lele Marchitelli. With Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri. Netflix, 130 minutes. Theatrical release December 2nd, 2012, from December 15th on Netflix.