Italian cinema comes alive when it dares. This was clearly demonstrated on the first day at the Lido by two complementary films, both by Neapolitan directors: La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino and La Gioia by Nicolangelo Gelormini.
The two titles mirror each other through pairs of concepts – law and desire, institution and body, doubt and guilt. In La Grazia, Sorrentino stages the political power that fascinates him, grappling with clemency yet unable to save himself. Gelormini, by contrast, delves into the body, its apparent pleasures, and the forward escapes of a character, the young male prostitute Alessio (Saul Nanni delivers a near “Sorrentinian” revelation), lost as in the finest Dostoevskian fashion, while flirting with Kierkegaardian ideas of seduction embodied by Queen Olsen, once again convincingly portrayed by Valeria Golino.
While Sorrentino constructs his likely masterpiece as a secular ceremony, a theological treatise disguised as comedy, Gelormini’s film is a broken ritual in which longed-for joy is consumed by guilt. Between promised graces and lost pleasures, the sacred seems to appear, only to fade; what captivates us is a sense of condemnation, a harsh fate of illumination, which nonetheless emerges in the adjacent direction – especially in the disruptive use of music – of both filmmakers. In the background, Sorrentino’s Turin of the last (and of Truth) resonates with Gelormini’s French-speaking, God-fearing cultural milieu that hosts his characters.
Seen together, the two films map our imagination between the Quirinale and street life, institutions and eros, solemnity and abandon. This is cinema that does not console but questions, using theatricality to give strength and intensity to dialogue and story, asserting that grace and joy are not possessions, but tensions – openings that expose us to the mystery of others and ourselves.
Sorrentino leaves Naples and its baroque humanity, steeped in philosophical disillusion, to embrace the expansive atmospheres of Turin, the “magical city,” in what many see as a return to the rigor of his early works. The project remains shrouded in near-proverbial secrecy...
An alienating Turin sets the backdrop for the only Italian film in Competition: a story of bodies, love, light, and shadow. It tells the painful relationship between Gioia, a high school teacher who has never known true love, and Alessio, a student who sells his body to suppor...
