La grazia
Movies
La Grazia is a film about love.
That inexhaustible engine that gives rise to doubt, jealousy, tenderness, emotion, an understanding of the things of life and responsibility.
Love and all its intricate offshoots are seen and experienced through the eyes of Mariano De Santis, an entirely fictional but credible President of the Italian Republic.
Mariano De Santis loves his late wife, he loves his daughter and son and the generational gap that separates them from him. He loves criminal law, which he has studied all his life.
Behind his serious and austere demeanour, Mariano De Santis is a man of love.
La Grazia is a film about doubt.
And the need to embrace it. This is especially true in politics and even more so today, in a world where politicians too often present a blunt package of certainties that only cause damage, friction and resentment. This undermines collective well-being, dialogue and general harmony.
Mariano De Santis is a man driven by doubt.
La Grazia is a film about responsibility.
Another quality that should belong to all of us, but which, above all, ought to define politicians, those who represent others and guide or shape decisions.
Responsibility too is something we feel the absence of; an almost willful evasion that today gives way to empty displays and muscular posturing: harmful, if not outright dangerous.
Mariano De Santis is a responsible man.
La Grazia is a film about fatherhood.
Politicians are worthy of the name only if they embody the noble and reassuring quality of parenthood, not if they slip into the role, so dear to certain politicians today, of the wayward child.
Mariano De Santis is a noble father. But, as an intelligent man guided by doubt, he knows when it is time to become a son once again.
As age advances and the present begins to feel incomprehensible, rather than despise it or lose himself in futile fits of nostalgia, he opens himself to the present through his children, who are better equipped to understand the world around them.
And he trusts them.
Mariano De Santis is a remarkable father.
La Grazia is a film about a moral dilemma.
Whether or not to grant clemency to two individuals who have committed murder, though perhaps in circumstances that might be forgiven.
Whether or not, as a Catholic, to sign a problematic bill on euthanasia.
As a young man I was profoundly struck by Kieslowski’s Decalogue. A masterpiece entirely focused on moral dilemmas; the plot of all plots, the only truly compelling narrative. More than any thriller.
I don’t believe I have even remotely approached the genius of Kieslowski, nor the depth with which he tackled moral themes, but I felt compelled to try anyway, in a historical moment when ethics sometimes seems optional, elusive, opaque, or all too often invoked only for instrumental reasons.
Ethics is a serious matter. It holds up the world.
And Mariano De Santis is a serious-minded man.
Paolo Sorrentino