In the elaborate opening shot of Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, the camera flies over a blue expanse of water. After a few seconds, we see a bay with hills studded with villas and apartments. Three power boats are blasting over the ocean, shot like arrows or cannon-balls at the harbor. (We are seeing Naples.) As the camera glides over the fast-moving boats, we hear them bouncing on the waves -- with each bounce the boats make a sort of coughing or huffing sound as they plow through the water, leaping up and down like dolphin. The shot continues to the harbor and, then, tracks along an sea-side road where we seen antique automobile, a big hearse-like conveyance from the 1920's driving between the city and the Mediterranean. About a half-hour later, we see similar speed boats bouncing over the waves near where a family is sunbathing on their skiff. Someone says that the boats are cigarette smugglers pursued by the local coast guard. Again, we hear the sound of the vessels rhythmically sluicing over the waves. Much later in the film, the movie's protagonist, Fabietto, is talking to drunk gangster. The gangster, who has taken an avuncular interest in the teenager says: "Do you know what sound a boat going at 200 kilometers makes?" Fabietto doesn't know. "Toof! Toof! Toof!" the hoodlum tells him. Toward the end of the movie, we see another group of speed boats jetting across the Neapolitan harbor. And, indeed, we recognize that they do make a sound exactly as described by the gangster. In the film, the racing speedboats symbolize youth accelerating into manhood -- the sound "toof! toof! toof!"signifies something like an uncontrolled and reckless motion that propels the young man forward into the unknown adventures of his adulthood. The speedboats and their sound are objective correlatives that embody the desires that drive young people into becoming themselves. Fabietto visits a relative who is in jail. Fabietto has become an orphan by the "hand of God". The prisoner pities him -- at least, his parents can come and visit him in jail. Fabietto tells the young man, apparently, a cousin, that speedboats shooting across the water at 200 km an hour make the sound "toof! toof! toof!"
I have presented this example to demonstrate the poetic qualities of Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021 - Netflix Original). Sorrentino is one of the best filmmakers working today. The Hand of God has not been particularly well-received because it is deemed self-indulgent. This is a meaningless objection. Film-making at the highest level is often enormously self-indulgent -- millions of dollars spend on realizing someone's personal fantasies or recollections. The question for a critic is whether the self-indulgence on display is artistically developed and given form by the director/screenwriter. Sorrentino, who is often quite obscure (there are many portions of his HBO series The Young Pope and its sequel The New Pope that are completely baffling) has here framed his memoir into a lyrical format -- this means that images and motifs re-occur and, at each iteration, deepen in meaning. "Toof!" is the perfect expression of how Neapolitan speedboats sound as they breast the waves -- this is the right word for this experience. And the reiteration of this motif comes to shape our understanding of the film's subject matter. There are non-narrative ways of making sense and Sorrentino deploys them with great subtlety and vigor in this autobiographical picture. The film will not please some people because it is baroque with symbols and idiosyncratic personal mythology. But I think The Hand of God is very good and deserves close study.
The Hand of God references a famous soccer shot by Diego Maradona -- while playing for Argentina in the World Cup, Maradona made a goal by fisting the ball into the end-zone net. The refs didn't see the fist and awarded the goal to Argentina. (Argentina went on to win the game against an English team by another goal scored by Maradona.) In the film, the genteel Communist Scisa family members interpret the "hand of God" as "political" -- the revenge of the Argentines against the British imperialists who defeated them at the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands. As the film progresses, the "Hand of God" takes on a more sinister aspect -- referring to an Act of God that kills both of the hero's parents. Fabietto is at a soccer game watching his idol, Maradona, who has been hired to play for Naples, when carbon monoxide gas kills his parents -- thus, he was spared by the Hand of God. The divine Hand is evident in the flamboyant opening sequence in the film: Patrizia, a gorgeous schizophrenic, is picked up by San Gennaro, riding as a passenger in the elaborate and expensive antique car first seen in the opening shot. She is escorted into a ruinous villa with a huge ornate chandelier fallen unceremoniously on its side in the ballroom -- this is an extraordinary image. In the ballroom, San Gennaro grabs Patrizi's ass and she meets the "little monk", a spectral figure hidden in rust-red robes. San Gennaro tells Patrizia that she is no longer sterile and can have a child with her husband, Franco. Patrizia goes home to her lavish apartment where Franco beats her and accuses her of being a whore. She locks herself in the bedroom and calls her sister, Maria (Fabietto's mother). Mounted on Fabietto's motorscooter, Maria, Fabietto's father, Saverno, and the teenage boy ride to her rescue. After the fight, Franco makes love to Patrizia and, as the Saint as promised, she gets pregnant. But a week later, there's another fight and Patrizia has a miscarriage. (We learn this latter detail at the end of the movie when Patrizia, fearing suicide, has had herself committed to an asylum.) In this sequence, the hand of God is literally represented by San Gennaro clutching Patrizia's buttocks. At the end of the movie, as Fabietto leaves Naples for Rome, he sees the "little monk" at a deserted railroad station. The little monk removes his cowl and we see that he's cherubic tow-headed boy who cheerfully waves to Fabietto, symbolically, I suppose, blessing his exodus from Naples to Rome where the hero hopes to become a film maker. (These scenes are redolent of Fellini's great masterpiece about coming of age, I Vittelloni (a touchstone for The Hand of God, Of course the film also channels Amarcord).
The Hand of God divides into two parts. Most of the imagery in the second half is a development or reiteration of things we have seen in the first half of the movie. In the first part of the film, Sorrentino introduces us to the various members of the Scisa clan -- there is a menacing grandmother who eats like a pig and glowers at everyone, various uncles and cousins, Patrizia who is drop-dead gorgeous but crazy, and a Baroness who lives upstairs, the wife of a famous deceased gynecologist who periodically appears at family gatherings -- she is summoned by pounding on the floor of her apartment with a broom. One of Fabietto's aunts, a fat woman with huge legs, has a new boyfriend, a former Venetian Police Inspector who fancies himself a ladies' man and talks through an electronic voice-box since he has apparently lost his larynx to cancer. While the family is boating near Capri, the police commissioner gabs in his electronic voice to such an extent that Patrizia, who has terrified everyone by sunbathing stark nude at the prow of the little yacht, asks to see his "voice thing", opens it, removes the battery and to the chagrin of the former cop throws the battery into the sea. (As an illustration of the film's poetic structure, this scene is recapitulated 70 minutes later when Fabietto on his way out of town sees Patrizia looking down at him from her asylum window (she is "(his) muse" as he has said); Patrizia throws something out the window. It turns out to be a battery that Fabietto who has isolated himself with Walkman after his parent's death, uses for his own device. The Scisa family is very close, but Saverno has a wandering eye and engages in affairs. This causes Maria to sob and shriek uncontrollably and Fabietto's divided loyalties are such that he has a sort of seizure due to his mother's grief. Fabietto's brother, Marchino, auditions at a casting call for Fellini. Fellini won't hire the young man because his "features are too common." A movie is shot in Naples featuring a figure hanging over the cavernous interior of a sort of Baroque shopping arcade -- this image will come back in the film's final minutes as a symbol for the hero's life in suspension before he leaves Naples for Rome. Saverno tells his son to have sex with someone -- she can be "a dog" his father says -- just to get that issue resolved so that he can embark on normal relations with women. In the second half of the film, Fabietto is summoned to Baroness' spooky apartment to catch a bat. He fails at this task but then the old woman seduces him -- following his now-dead father's advicedFabietto makes love to the elderly woman and says he will see her again. "No," she says sternly. "From now on, you will make love to girls your own age." The film pivots around the shocking deaths of Maria and Saverno. After his parents are killed, Fabietto makes love to the Baroness, visits Patrizia in the asylum, has a brief friendship with a gangster and, then, encounters a wildly self-aggrandizing filmmaker who tells Fabietto to say in Naples and make movies about the city, the most beautiful place in the world. This advice is given to Fabietto is a sea-side grotto with elaborate vaults -- a sort of 17th century bathing pavilion. The outspoken director swims out to sea, paddling straight along a path of radiance made by the rising sun. (This scene mirrors a sequence earlier in which the smuggler takes Fabietto by speed boat to Capri to go dancing -- but the island is completely deserted and,so, the two men go swimming in the blue grotto where the gangster announces that he will be Fabietto's lifelong friend. But, a couple minutes later, when Fabietto calls him, the gangster is taking a bath with his voluptuous girlfriend ladling water on his back and he won't take his young protegees call (probably fortunately).
In some ways, the picture is archetypally Italian after the manner of Fellini at his most carnivalesque. The settings are lavish and spectacular. (At one point, the hero spends part of his vacation on Stromboli where the volcano is erupting in full spate.) The people are memorable=y weird-looking, grotesque or grotesquely beautiful. The film is recondite with Catholic imagery. A passionate female saint peers down on the bed where Fabietto is having sex with the Baroness. Throughout the picture, the scholarly Fabietto tags scenes with phrases from Dante's poetry, dialogue that puzzles everyone. But when his parents die, the malign Signora, his grandmother who is feared and hated by all, speaks several lines from The Inferno to the hero -- she, perhaps, alone understands him. (We have earlier seen all the Aunts and Uncles beating her savagely after one of her vicious outbursts -- it's shocking and over-the-top and, of course, signifies that much of the film's imagery is as perceived and remembered by the sensitive and artist Fabietto -- in other words what we see is seen through his eyes.) It's an excellent movie and, probably, a key in some respects to other films by Sorrentino and I recommend it highly. The movie is also worthwhile for the most impressive display of hula hoop artistry ever filmed.
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