Published on April 5, 2026
Each frame, a gift for the eyes. Each line, a gift for the intellect. Together, ideas that move. Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema is as easy to describe and understand as it is challenging to create, and *La Grazia* stands as yet another testament to this superlative ability. The director has been blessed with the deep clarity of Italian humanists—a gift innately present in his country, from Ernesto Grassi and Antonio Gramsci to Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, to name just a few from the 20th century. Like them, his mastery consists of restoring transparency to essential themes. Life and death, love and mourning, friendship and betrayal, passion and sadness, search and disenchantment… The substratum of existence flows in Sorrentino’s cinema with an (apparent) lightness that disarms even the most cynical critic, or should do so. Because his images are not echoes of the past, but memories of the future.
In *La Grazia*, Sorrentino’s humanist ideology blossoms with his usual blend of comedy and tragedy. This combination, although common throughout his filmography, began to take on a tone of melancholy starting with *Youth* (2015). Time passes in the blink of an eye, Sorrentino tells us in this film, and since then, his cinema has only deepened that uncontrollable chasm through which the illusory sense of immortality that colors our youth slips away. This is the central theme of the magnificent and misunderstood *Parthenope* (2024), where the myth of the siren who went to die in the Tyrrhenian transforms into a reflection on what we do and, above all, what we do not do with our days. The screenplay of *La Grazia* reframes this concern into the question, “Whose days are ours?” From this inquiry, the filmmaker offers what may be his most heartfelt and complex meditation on death as the final vital stop—both his own and that of others.
Sorrentino’s collaborator in giving voice and face to his ideas is once again Toni Servillo, here playing the outgoing President of the Italian Republic. Mariano De Santis faces the last six months of his term with the calmness of knowing he leaves a legacy of caution and moderation—until he discovers that he is nicknamed “Reinforced Concrete” due to his tendency to do nothing. Then doubts assail him. What if his life has been nothing but a long journey to nowhere? What if his desire to let things resolve themselves is simply cowardice? His nickname suddenly places him before the mirror of several pending accounts: a controversial law regulating the right to euthanasia, two cases of pardons for prisoners convicted of murdering their partners, a difficult relationship with his two children, and the mourning for his deceased wife. De Santis must decide whether to sit and count the days left to return home or to use his waning power to change some things.
Death, or its proximity, is the thread that stitches together all of De Santis’s concerns, which are also those of the utopian Italy imagined *La Grazia*, featuring a Black Pope, an open debate on euthanasia, and a President of the Republic assuming the powers recognized , above that of the Prime Minister. None of this is real, yet the director of *The Great Beauty* (*La grande bellezza*, 2013) speculates on it in a film that, for the first time in his career, leans closer to Visconti than Fellini, precisely because death, and not life, saturates his images. It seems that both his cinema and he himself are irretrievably decided to shed the carnival mask for that of the dead. Sorrentino no longer settles for merely pointing out the cracks in his country; he now proposes progressive alternatives that are not incompatible with tradition. The magnificent sequence featuring the veterans of the Alpini (the Alpine division of the Italian army) is testament to this. The tricolor veil that covers its final shot is both a declaration of love for Italy and the courage—the most repeated word in the screenplay—needed to change it.
More unexpected yet equally brilliant is Sorrentino’s approach to Resnais in certain parts of *La Grazia*. The most evident is the homage to the concert in *Last Year at Marienbad* (*L’année dernière à Marienbad*, 1961), during the scene showcasing the dance performance, when De Santis suddenly feels the presence of his wife’s lover. This moment introduces the second cardinal theme of the film, very Resnaisean: the truth and its relationship with memory. De Santis, a trained jurist, has dedicated his career to the pursuit of certainties that assure him just and objective decision-making, compliant with the law. On the verge of retirement, the veteran politician discovers that authentic “grazia” is not truth or forgiveness, but doubt, and that overcoming it requires courage and bravery, even at the risk of making mistakes. In this revelation, the relationship of progressive openness he maintains with his daughter (Anna Ferzetti), the Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin), and the coracero (Orlando Cinque) who works as his personal bodyguard is definitive. There isn’t a poor scene with any of them.
The only drawback one could point out regarding *La Grazia* is that Sorrentino unnecessarily emphasizes his own ideas during the phone interview between De Santis and the editor of *Vogue Italia* just at the film’s conclusion. This sort of “summary for the distracted” adds no nuance to the film’s main thesis, encapsulated in the motto of the cavalry corps—*Virtus in periculis firmior* (Virtue is strengthened in danger)—that adorns the riding school courtyard where Elvis, De Santis’s horse
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