Paolo Sorrentino

  • È stata la mano di Dio [The Hand of God] (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2022) As far as foreign-movies-in-which-writer-director-hyphenates-reflect-on-their-early-years go, The Hand of God is really not as dull as many others. Here, Paolo Sorrentino takes us back to 1980s Naples to follow a young man apparently much like himself, as he deals with a large and boisterous family, goes through a sexual awakening, cheers for Maradona, finds his way and learns the sound that motorboats do at high speed. Explicit references to Fellini (as a character auditions for one of his movies) reinforce the kinship between this film and other affectionate autobiographical pictures. But The Hand of God isn’t stuffy—crisp cinematography helps present a film that’s comic, tragic, self-reflective and often surprisingly entertaining. There are traces of self-indulgence here, but they’re inherent in the project itself—how else to make an autobiographical film? While the result may not be entirely within my wheelhouse, I can only respect the result.

  • Youth (2015)

    Youth (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2016) I’m not normally a fan of elliptic artistic films driven less by plot than by contemplation of deep themes, but there is something about Youth that makes the experience entertaining, even gripping at times. Benefiting from the acting talents of Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as veteran creators struggling with the accumulated weight of their lives, Youth ponders issues of life and death, loops into vignettes that have little to do with the plot, veers into dream sequences, and discusses the pitfalls of the creative process and fame. It is alternatively grandiose, pretentious, intimate, funny, surreal, tragic and oblique. On paper, it sounds like a terrible mishmash of everything that the writer/director Paolo Sorrentino has thought about in making the film. And yet it works. I’m not sure why. The humour helps a lot, of course, and the way the film uses Madalina Diana Ghenea’s assets gleefully feels like exploitation. But there’s also a suspicion that Youth talks about life in a blunt way, using experiences that most of us will never have (being solicited for knighthood, being unable to secure a famed actress for our newest screenplay, even resting a few weeks in a five-star hotel in the Alps) to talk spectacularly about universal issues. The quality of the images, as incongruous as they can be, also contributes to a renewed interest in the film. No matter why, Youth does succeed at creating a memorable viewing experience. Not bad for a film that many, including myself, would have thrown dismissively in the “made for Cannes” bin.