THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 65
Naples. “He’d never leave Barcelona for
this shithole,” somebody says. Yet the
miracle comes to pass.
No less wondrous is our realization
that, by the end, we don’t want to leave
the shithole. There’s a long alfresco se-
quence of a crowded lunch, groaning
with good food and gossip, that will cause
most moviegoers to whimper with envy
and yearning. One of the curious side
effects of the coronavirus pandemic has
been to refresh our wanderlust, and to
restore one of cinema’s basic and most
venerable functions; namely, to make us
wish to be where we are not. That’s how
it was for the earliest audiences, before
the epoch of mass travel, and that’s how
it feels again now. The heavenly shots of
Naples, viewed from the bay and glitter-
ing in the sun, are impossible to resist,
and, when Fabietto’s aunt Patrizia (Luisa
Ranieri), whom he adores, turns and
looks at him, in silence, framed by olive
trees and lulled in late-afternoon light,
we know that this moment of epiphany
is one he will not forget. Same here.
While “Licorice Pizza” supplies its
hero with plenty of pals and workmates
but only a couple of relations, “The Hand
of God” is the other way around. It’s
startling to hear Fabietto, on his birth-
day, say, “I don’t have friends,” but it’s
true. What he has instead is an extended
family—tense and internecine, yet never
less than sustaining. Besides Patrizia,
we meet Fabietto’s brother, an aspiring
actor named Marchino (Marlon Jou-
bert), with whom he still shares a room
as if they were little boys, and their par-
ents, Saverio (Toni Servillo) and Maria
(Teresa Saponangelo), who are so at-
tuned to one another that they can com-
municate by whistling, like blackbirds.
(The film wells with particular sounds;
one fellow, a cheerful miscreant who
winds up in prison, describes with rap-
ture the “tuff, tuff, tuff ” that you hear as
a speedboat slaps the waves.) Also part
of the clan: a tetchy uncle who asks,
“When did you all become such disap-
pointments?,” plus a foulmouthed elder
who wears a fur coat in summer and
holds a dripping burrata in her hands,
munching it like a peach. Later, though,
even she is gently redeemed, as she
quotes consoling lines of Dante at a fu-
neral. No one disappoints, beneath the
film’s forgiving gaze.
Sorrentino is best known for “The
Great Beauty” (2013), his sumptuous
panegyric to Rome. Naples, though, is
his birthplace and his cradle, whereas
Rome is more equivocally referred to,
in the new movie, as “the great decep-
tion”—the magnet to which outsiders
like Fabietto are inescapably lured—
as if all the beauty were a lie. The per-
son who sensed that attraction most
keenly, of course, was Fellini, and that
is why “The Hand of God” wrestles
with his legacy; Marchino auditions
for a Fellini production, surrounded by
exotic hopefuls, and the sight of a huge
chandelier, its blaze undimmed, lying
aslant on the floor of a half-deserted
house would have suited “La Dolce
Vita” (1960). With pride, Fabietto re-
cites one of the Maestro’s maxims: “Re-
ality is lousy.”
Yet “The Hand of God” is most af-
fecting when reality does intrude—not
only when fate takes a terrible hand,piercing the family’s heart, but also in
stretches of languor. Look at Fabietto’s
father, jabbing the buttons on the TV
with a stick and announcing, “I’m a
Communist,” as if that excused his lazy
reluctance to buy a remote; or strolling
through the nineteenth-century ele-
gance of the Galleria Umberto, and
murmuring, “See that column? I spent
the entire war leaning against it.” That’s
my favorite line of dialogue this year,
and it links Sorrentino’s film to the ev-
eryday joys of “Licorice Pizza.” As win-
ter impends, we are lucky to have this
pair of balmy tales. They strike me as
tender, in both senses, being at once
benign in mood and painfully sensitive
to the touch, and they suggest that the
remembrance of things past may be
more inf lamed than soothed by the
flow of time. “I don’t know if I can be
happy,” Fabietto says. Only one way to
find out. “We sent you a secure access code! Do not share this code with
anyone! Your access code will expire in ten minutes!”