291. Italian film director Paolo Sorrentino's 10th feature film "Grace" (La Grazia) (2025) in Italian, based on his original screenplay: Grace is the beauty of doubt

 

God suggests questions and carefully avoids giving answers. It is not our task to provide answers. It is not the task of science to provide answers.

-- A fictional black Pope advising his troubled fictional friend and President of Italy

The Silver Hugo for the Best Screenplay goes to Paolo Sorrentino for Grace because the auteur made words become flesh of the film; for the creation of wonderful characters; and a story that feels spontaneous yet precise in its depiction of power, its moral dilemmas, and the absurd contradictions with the human condition.

-- The citation for the Silver Hugo awarded by the 2025 Chicago Film Festival, USA

 

Director Paolo Sorrentino is arguably the best Italian filmmaker alive and active.  What makes his works stand out from his Italian contemporaries is that his films are based on his own original screenplays. He also loves to team up with his favorite actor Toni Servillo ever since they worked on Sorrentino's early work Consequences of Love (2004); Grace is Sorrentino's seventh feature film where Servillo adds immense value to the director's work. So too, many of Sorrentino's screenplays are connected with his favorite writer the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who viewed 'doubt' not as an obstacle to creation, but as the painful, inescapable reality of the human condition. His writings suggest that we must continuously choose between comforting lies and the relentless, often agonizing "truth." In Consequences of Love, two young girls read out a passage from a Céline's book in earshot of the male protagonist in the film played by Servillo. Doubt resurfaces as the main theme of Grace 22 years and a dozen Sorrentino films later.

In Grace, Sorrentino creates a fictional contemporary Italian President De Santis (Servillo), a widower and a former lawyer, who is in the final months of his elected Presidency and awaiting imminent retirement as an ordinary citizen. The President is loved and respected by the Italian citizens as he averted six crises during his tenure and has gained the nick-name "Reinforced Concrete." There is a connection for Sorrentino viewers to recall the unforgettable ending of the lead character's life in Sorrentino's early film Consequences of Love which shows the lead character buried alive in liquid concrete mixture.  Sorrentino's fictional President Mariano De Santis in Grace is apparently modeled on two real life Italian Presidents--Sandro Pertini, who had a nick-name "Hard Concrete" and another recent one, President Sergio Mattarella, who had his daughter accompanying him during key functions. Sorrentino's fictional President De Santis also has a daughter, Dorotea, a lawyer, who helps him on crucial official matters.

The President (Servillo) and daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti)

Sorrentino's President in Grace, apart from his normal ceremonial duties, has three important decisions to make before he demits office. There are two convicts awarded death sentence by the courts in separate cases which have led to mercy requests from the public to the Italian President for clemency. One convict killed his wife suffering from Alzheimer's disease to reduce her suffering akin to a private act of euthanasia. The other convict killed her husband who was making her married life miserable because of his psychologically warped demands. The third decision relates to making euthanasia legal. There is much to ponder on the last one: assent would make the President a murderer to many Italians including his friend the Pope, who amusingly prefers to ride a motorbike without accompanying Swiss guards in sight and not in a Pope-mobile--aspects of comedy that one can expect in all Sorrentino films. Rejection of the euthanasia bill the President realizes would be tantamount to torture. Sorrentino's script adds a quaint parallel situation nearer to him where the President's favorite horse lies down and refuses to get up and its trainer suggests that it is time to put it to sleep--another case of euthanasia, this time of an animal. The President does not allow it, when it comes to his favorite steed.

Making a decision is never easy for the President--
there are doubts galore

Sorrentino adds yet another "doubt" factor into his tale--the President knew his wife was unfaithful to him and that person was someone close to him--with no further clues. Yet the President continues to love his dead wife, irrespective of her infidelity, who seemed walk on air as though she was free of gravity's pull. The troubled President states in the film "I would like to dream about lack of gravity." That statement is connected with the President's friend currently in a spaceship, their conversation and with a tear drop of the space traveler falling on the camera. Grace does indeed reveal the identity of the President's wife's lover, who is a trusted friend of President De Santis with a touch of comedy that has a typical Sorrentino comic touch that his fans will love. As the fictional Pope in the film remarks to his friend the President: "We weren't clever; we were elegant."

All of Sorrentino's work are elegant; Grace is no exception.

P.S. Grace did not win the Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival while competing in the main section--it lost out to the US film Father Mother Sister Brother, directed by Jim Jarmusch. Grace did win, at the same festival other awards, in the main competition for Best Actor (Servillo) and for Best Production Manager (Elda Baldi), and several collateral Pasinetti awards for best Film, Actor, and Actress chosen among all Italian film shown at the festival. Four Sorrentino films have been reviewed earlier on this blog: Consequences of Love (2004); This Must Be the Place (2011); The Great Beauty (2013); and Youth (2015). Mr Sorrentino is one of the author's favorite active filmmakers. This Must be the Place and Youth are two Sorrentino films made in English, with Hollywood/British actors. (Please click on the names of the Sorrentino films in the post-script to access their reviews on this blog.)

290. The late Hungarian director Béla Tarr's seventh feature film "Kárhozat" (Damnation) (1988): The first of six amazing Tarr films in collaboration with the 2025 Nobel literature prize-winner László Krasznahorkai

 

 

Director Béla Tarr is someone who "created colors by making them disappear" (a trite reference to his black-and-white films) and as an artist who, in his films, "tried to speak as the sinner who, nevertheless, with all his sins, must still be loved." 

---Nobel literature prize-winner László Krasznahorkai in his Nobel banquet speech on 10 Dec 2025. Bela Tarr died on 6 Jan 2026.

There is a marked difference between the films Béla Tarr made before Damnation and thereafter--a significant shift thanks to his new partnership with co-scriptwriter Krasznahorkai, a shift reminiscent of the beginning of  the collaboration between Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and his new co-scriptwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz from 1985 till Kieslowski's death in March 1996. The two distinct collaborations (in two different but geographically close countries) produced amazing cinematic works weaving strands of philosophy, theology, politics and sociology. Damnation is indeed a film by and on a "sinner, who nevertheless, with all his sins, must still be loved," as his friend  Krasznahorkai described it so appropriately in his Nobel banquet speech.

There are very few spoken words and they are economically used; but the camera does the talking instead. When Tarr shows his main character Karrer, alone in his apartment, staring out of a window at a ropeway carrying coal for a long while, the viewer is forced to decipher Karrer's possible thoughts. That is how Damnation works. The viewer has empathize with the human beings, the environment, social interactions, such that a thinking viewer can grasp the existential elements, scene by scene. Aspects of alienation and existentialism drenches the film just as the rain on the ground in the film.

Damnation is set in a nameless Hungarian town where the climate is rainy, damp, with few children but populated more with stray dogs living in harmony with the human population. Evidently there is a coal mine nearby as a ropeway is continuously transporting coal somewhere. The only vehicle shown in the film is a car belonging to the family of a key character. For a small town, there are several bars, where the towns population converge in the evenings. The main protagonist is called Karrer who appears to be unemployed but is served drinks at the bars without payment. Everyone in the film is sullen and stare mid-distance without purpose, unless there is dance and merrymaking in one of the bars. Economic development apparently is at a standstill. Smuggling of some unnamed goods appear to be an attraction for some. Evidently this tale set is Hungary prior to glasnost.

Karrer staring, without purpose. out of his window at 
the coal ropeway contemplating his bleak existence

In this film, Karrer fits the description of a sinner "who with all his sins must still be loved." Karrer is hopelessly involved in an illicit affair with a married woman who sings at a bar ominously named "Titanic Bar." Everything in the film seems to point to tragedy. The film introduces the viewer the to lady first with her voice and later her to her visage. The song she sings underscores the socio-political situation in the film. It is an absolutely stunning sequence, in which her song sung in a bleak surrounding states "It is finished. It's all over. There won't be another....it is like a nightmare. Where is somebody new? Where will he come from? Or won't he come? ...It is good that utopia exists. It's good to know I won't be here long." Here the viewer is re-introduced to existentialist queries similar to Karrer's stare out of the window at the ropeway this time thanks to the words of the song and the minimalistic music.

The illicit lovers 

The theological intervention/warning to Karrer comes later in the narrative from the elderly well-meaning cloakroom woman at the Titanic bar who has noticed the illicit affair when she confronts Karrer, near the building where his lover lives, and advises the down-and-out depressed Karrer to mend  his ways by quoting the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, Chapter 7:14-19. Karrer ignores her and proceeds to his lovers' residence. 

The well-meaning elderly cloakroom woman

Visually Damnation is emphasizing rain in black-and-white. Rain splattering a dry wall and wetting it gradually is not merely beautiful but metaphorically captures the essence of depressing life in a small unknown town in Hungary that offers few options for its population to improve their lot except by visiting bars, by playing billiards, and by moping about their social predicaments.

Rainfall forming shapes on a dry wall

A dog enjoys the rainy puddle outside the bar

 

Some escape the rain by dancing inside the bar...

...and there are loners who enjoy the rain by dancing in the open.

The rain in Damnation recalls the metaphoric use of rain in the 1971 Indian film Ashad Ka Ek Din (One day before the rainy season) directed by Mani Kaul and adapted from Mohan Rakesh's first Hindi play that had challenged and changed the quality of Hindi drama considerably from then onwards. That play was about a real poet and playwright called Kalidasa, who lived in India, 15 centuries before Rakesh and had a love affair with a woman that did not end well. The film of the Mohan Rakesh play begins with Mallika, its female lead drenched in rain followed by moody and drenched atmosphere throughout with little or no sunshine in the entire film. That is indeed similar to the feel and structure of Damnation. Both films have rain in many sequences and both have a tale of love between a man and a woman that does not end well.

Apart from the cloakroom woman's impromptu recollection of the Biblical passage from the book of Ezekiel for Karrer to mend his ways, the final segments of Damnation recalls the actions parallel to those of Judas Iscariot in the Bible. After Karrer notes that his lover has left the bar with her husband, we are shown Karrer at the police station, revealing smuggling activities of his lover's husband that Karrer had suggested to him for Karrer's own benefit.

Karrer at the police station providing smuggling evidence
against his lover's husband

And like Judas, he ends up in a Potter's Field (Akeldama or where the sinners/outcasts were buried in Jerusalem in Jesus' time). Karrer's betrayal of the husband, does not get him his lover, but only secures his own social, spiritual and metaphorical descent into the rainy mud. Karrer's barking like dog at a real dog is provides an image of the burial of Karrer's humanity while alive. The film ends with a close-up of a lump of mud.

Karrer barking at a dog in the empty muddy field

What will puzzle the viewer  of the film is how much of the script belongs to Bela Tarr and how much to László Krasznahorkai. The script was not based on any written work of Krasznahorkai but was a joint original screenplay of both members of the creative team, with Tarr's name appearing above that of Krasznahorkai in the film's credits.

P.S. Mani Kaul's film Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971), mentioned in the above review, is one of the author's favorite Indian films.