Going back to Naples and the tragedy that changed his life, The Great Beauty director evokes his adolescence with bawdy vigour
At 16, Paolo Sorrentino returned home to find that both his parents were dead, killed by a carbon monoxide leak. On the night of the tragedy, Sorrentino was inside a football stadium, watching Diego Maradona play for his local team, Napoli. Afterwards, he would say – not wholly joking – that Maradona saved his life.
More than three decades on, in the middle act of a career that has already won him an Oscar, the Italian film-maker has retraced his steps, turned back the clock and fashioned this foundational horror into a fevered coming-of-age tale, a movie that played to a capacity crowd here in Venice. The Hand of God, no surprise, is Sorrentino’s most nakedly personal film to date, almost to a fault in the way it jettisons the cool distance of The Great Beauty or Il Divo in favour of a sweaty, close-up evocation of youth. It’s a picture only Sorrentino could make. But that doesn’t necessarily make him the safest pair of hands.