by Hudson Moura
La Grazia, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, opens with an unusually extended title card enumerating the prerogatives of the presidency—rights that reach into the army and the magistracy. From the outset, power is framed less as abstraction than as a codified apparatus, a catalogue of competencies that immediately casts its holder as something adjacent to sovereignty. President De Santis—nicknamed “reinforced concrete”—moves through this apparatus like an aging monarch: austere, ritual-bound, near the end of a mandate that feels like the end of an era.
Visually, the film is defined by sobriety and precision. Sorrentino composes frames with a painterly restraint—geometric, balanced, ceremonious—so that each image reads as a tableau of state and interior life. That geometry does not merely aestheticize authority; it echoes the film’s preoccupation with ritual, protocol, and the choreography of eminence. De Santis’s world is a succession of ceremonies and procedures, and the camera’s measured elegance makes that world palpable as both splendour and exhaustion. “I’m tired of rituals,” he admits, and the line resonates as an aesthetic statement as much as a psychological one.
The film’s emotional axis is memory—specifically, De Santis’s nostalgia for his late wife, Aurora. His recollection of their first meeting is voiced with devastating simplicity: “Aurora, when I remember, I die.” In La Grazia, remembrance is not reassurance or levity; it is pressure, a force that pulls the present toward the irretrievable. The plot’s more conventional disturbance—his suspicion that Aurora may have had a lover—does not function as melodramatic twist so much as a means of sharpening the film’s central question: what remains of the past when love is filtered through doubt, and doubt through time?
This philosophical or metaphysical meditation unfolds alongside the demands of office. De Santis confronts decisions on new law—euthanasia—and the granting (or refusal) of pardons to prisoners. Yet the film repeatedly punctures the gravity of statecraft with intrusions of the contemporary mundane: a fashion request from Vogue, rap music in his daughter’s room, modern dance—moments that are neither comic relief nor satire so much as reminders that the symbolic order of the state coexists awkwardly with the textures of everyday culture, which the President used to ignore. De Santis’s driest answer to the fashion question—essentially that Aurora used to like fashion—makes the point: the present keeps demanding statements, but his language keeps returning to loss.
Sorrentino also situates the film within a recognizably Italian tradition of symbolic, self-contained sequences—images that do not “explain” but insist. The figure of the astronaut alone in a spacecraft—crying, then laughing—crystallizes the film’s oscillation between pathos and absurdity, gravity suspension as De Santi’s thoughts, between existential solitude and the sudden, almost involuntary comedy of self-awareness. These sequences do not distract from the narrative; they give it its metaphysical weather.
The key term—la grazia—is defined as pardon. When the Pope tells De Santis that he possesses la grazia—pardon—the president answers with a simple, disarming question: “What is it?” The film’s answer is neither doctrinal nor procedural. Pardon becomes a late-life problem: not the cancellation of guilt, but the “beauty of doubt,” a state in which passion has been replaced by a fragile ethics of reconsideration. “Whose are our days? No one knows; we must discover,” De Santis reflects, only to arrive later at a paradox: they are ours, and yet a whole lifetime is insufficient to understand them. The film repeatedly returns to this sense of weight and lightness—the gravity of years, the possibility of “absence of gravity”—as if pardon were not a juridical act but a way of inhabiting time.
La Grazia extends Paolo Sorrentino’s sustained preoccupation with ritualized power, late-life reckoning, and the melancholic afterglow of beauty—concerns already central to The Great Beauty and Youth. Like The Great Beauty, it renders a social order through choreographed ceremony and painterly composition, yet it shifts from satirical panorama toward a more austere, institutional geometry in which sovereignty appears less as spectacle than as codified apparatus.
Like Youth, it treats aging as a metaphysical condition—memory as pressure, love as absence, time as something registered through fatigue and ritual—but here that private meditation is tightened around the political: the president’s decisions (pardons, euthanasia) transform Sorrentino’s familiar elegiac mode into an explicit inquiry into pardon as the “beauty of doubt.”
In relocating his signature interplay of beauty and decay—his oscillation between pathos and absurdity—from artists and socialites to a head of state, La Grazia asks the same visual splendour to carry the weight of authority, exhaustion, and the possibility (or impossibility) of release.
La Grazia’s measured geometry and symbolic flourishes align with its subject in remarkable coherence: as passion gives way to pardon—pardon figured as the “beauty of doubt”—the film moves toward an “absence of gravity,” a fragile lightness in which love’s afterlife persists not as certainty, but as what remains when there was, finally, no other choice. Paradoxically the film’s density is transmuted into lightness.
Rating: 4.5/5