La Grazia

Toni Servillo slips effortlessly into presidential tailoring in La Grazia, Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant, unexpectedly playful political drama. He plays Mariano De Santis, Italy’s head of state in the twilight of his term, who must decide whether to approve a euthanasia bill championed by his daughter-advisor Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) and whether to pardon two convicted murderers. On paper, it’s the stuff of grave political theatre. But on screen, Sorrentino gives it a strange, seductive charge.

De Santis repeatedly describes himself as “the most boring man I know”, though Sorrentino films him like a popstar. Crisp suits glide through marbled corridors to the pulse of EDM; panning shots render the presidency as a music video of power. The dissonance is deliberate: a reminder that politics is as much performance as decision-making. The great irony, teased throughout, is that De Santis was once a judge – a man who made rulings for a living. Now, paralysed by grief for his late wife and unable to shake a decades-old marital rupture, he falters both privately and publicly. Even the fate of his beloved, ailing horse becomes a sly echo of the euthanasia debate. 

Sorrentino delights in the absurdities of the president’s duties: requests for a comment to Vogue on fashion, or the presidential approval of a dinner menu, arrive alongside matters of life and death. The Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin) wears earrings and rides a motorcycle. Such moments keep the film from sinking into ponderousness; instead, it dances nimbly between satire and melancholy.

If the polish sometimes threatens to eclipse the politics, La Grazia ultimately earns its gravitas. Servillo is all weary charm and contradiction, and Sorrentino is less concerned with verdicts than with the theatre of hesitation, the way power corrodes through delay. The result is at once stylish, ironic and moving –  a portrait of a man, and a system, caught between past and present, duty and determination.

Christina Yang

La Grazia does not have a release date yet.

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