La Grazia

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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From Paulo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”), “La grazia” is an existential portrait of an outgoing president. The rhythmic and haunting film is imagistic, full of meaning and melancholy. While it is not as emotive and dramatic as his other narratives, it is most prominently eerie pointing to life’s ambiguities and petty grievances. 

A widowed Italian President DeSantis (Toni Servillo) is about to retire from public life after seven years in office. He is faced with feelings of doubt and irrelevance due to a more nationalistic Italy. He is well liked by the mainstream, but he knows his influence is coming to pass.

DeSantis is weary about signing a new law legalizing euthanasia, or medically assisted suicide, because of his staunch faith, believing in the ultimate sanctity of life at all cost. The president is also being pressured to sign pardons for people facing moral dilemmas. To top it off, DeSantis is saddened and somewhat embittered, thinking that his deceased wife was unfaithful to him.

DeSantis is overwhelmed, wanting to go blank and leave earthly bonds.

While this is not a tense thriller, the story emerges as a poignant meditation on human dilemmas. DeSantis is psychologically cornered on every side.

Toni Servillo is perfect as is Milvia Marigliano, DeSantis’s longtime friend Coco.

There are some fine surreal touches in the film including a dreamy spaceship sequence, a floundering official besieged by a flood of rain, and an AI robot roaming the empty streets. Security is now the realm of a RoboCop.

Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, DeSantis is forever looking for relevance and comfort.

He finds only a void of black stars in response.

Throughout the film, Desantis hungers for tactile human connection and gets repeatedly rebuffed. He looks to pop music and rap hoping to find an answer but only comes up with opaque riddles. Still, DeSantis remains intrigued by this mystery and speaks the lyrics as if they were sacred catechisms.

Vexed by worry, the president goes to the Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin) only to receive more questions and platitudes.

Desantis’s late wife Aurora is a dreamlike figure of metaphysical importance for a man who doesn’t dream. in the manner of Poe’s Annabel Lee or Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno.
Vague images of memory become DeSantis’s only living spaces.

At last, like Chance in Hal Ashby’s “Being There” (1979 ) the Italian president’s last adventure is to journey within, encapsulated in an ego-less spaceship where all questions of infidelity are nonexistent and any glittering lights from past disco parties wink into nothing.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com