The Hand of God (2021)

Paolo Sorrentino goes home to Naples, and the result is a loose, funny, sorrowful memoir of a boy, a football god, and a faulty heater. Fabietto drifts through a family of eccentrics, survives a tragedy that claims both parents, and stumbles toward the cinema. The film observes. It does not argue. Sorrentino's camera adores faces, balconies, and the noise of a crowded apartment, and it trusts the audience to draw whatever conclusions it likes.

The women in this world are drawn with real affection. Patrizia, the aunt whose marriage curdles into abuse, recounts a miraculous pregnancy and a miscarriage, then chooses a psychiatric hospital as sanctuary. The elderly Baroness receives Fabietto with a tenderness that has nothing to do with instruction. These are portraits, not positions. The film is a young man's memory of the women who surrounded him, and memory of that sort does not organize itself into a critique. No thesis about patriarchy is on offer, and none is pretending to be.

The closest the film comes to a sermon is a director's advice that Fabietto should not flee Naples but embrace its stories. It lands softly. Elsewhere, poverty and petty crime are atmosphere, texture, the sound of the neighborhood. Nobody delivers a speech about capital or the climate, and the death of the parents is a private catastrophe, not a parable. We are left with a warm, beautifully shot, faintly self-indulgent coming-of-age picture that treats its setting as a place to live in, not a case to be made. A sommelier would note the vintage and move along. So do we.

A note on provenance. The film is semi-autobiographical, drawn from the director's own youth, which places it in the true-story tradition. It is not a sequel, not a remake, not adapted from any book, and it concerns no superheroes. It was nominated for an Academy Award but did not win one, and it did not top the domestic box office. The classification is therefore narrow, and the cultural temperature is cool. Some vintages are simply meant to be drunk young, without ceremony, and this is one of them. We record the findings and set down the glass.

That said, the picture earns its warmth honestly. It never lectures, never curates its cast for approval, and never asks the audience to applaud its own virtue. It simply remembers, with the occasional flourish, and lets the remembering stand. In an era of cinema that frequently mistakes instruction for art, this restraint is its own small distinction. The scorekeeper nods, closes the ledger, and moves to the next bottle. There is always a next bottle, and it is usually louder than this one.