La Grazia
Drama • 2025 • 2h 13m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
The story focuses on Mariano De Santis, the President of the Republic, played by Toni Servillo. A man of faith, marked by the death of his wife and her betrayal forty years earlier. He faces a paradox: whether to grant or deny clemency to two condemned individuals, and to rule on a law concerning euthanasia. The question is not abstract, but radically existential: to grant clemency to one who killed his wife suffering from terminal Alzheimer’s, or to one who took the life of a loved one after years of violence and abuse?
A clear vision of the possible and the impossible… from this, and from nothing else, derive temperance and courage, virtues without which life is merely a shameful delirium.
— Simone Weil
— Simone Weil
With La grazia, Paolo Sorrentino returns to interrogate the fragility of existence and the invisible weight of the choices that define a collective destiny.
One question returns like a mantra: “To whom do our days belong?”
One question returns like a mantra: “To whom do our days belong?”
It is not merely a film about institutions, but a meditation on the enigma of the human being faced with the crossroads between loyalty to one’s feelings and the obligation to embody the law. Its premiere at the Venice Film Festival therefore does not appear as a worldly event, but as the opening of a space for thought, a gateway where cinema confronts the intertwining of love, loss, and responsibility.
An ancient motto silently traverses the film: “Virtus in periculis firmior”—courage grows stronger in danger. This is the secret key of the work: to show how virtue exists only in the face of risk, and how power is never neutral, but always in a body-to-body struggle with fear and death.
The story focuses on Mariano De Santis, the President of the Republic, played by Toni Servillo. A man of faith, marked by the death of his wife and her betrayal forty years earlier. He faces a paradox: whether to grant or deny clemency to two condemned individuals, and to rule on a law concerning euthanasia. The question is not abstract, but radically existential: to grant clemency to one who killed his wife suffering from terminal Alzheimer’s, or to one who took the life of a loved one after years of violence and abuse?
In this conflict between the rigidity of the law and the irreducible human pain, the abyss of every political choice is reflected—one that is never mere administration but always blood, flesh, responsibility. Politics, often embodying a hysterical relationship with truth, here oscillates between public duty and the inner silence of the individual who must decide.
By his side is his daughter Dorotea, who is not just a character but the figure that introduces the voice of the present: youth demanding openness, dialogue attempting to break the silence of a father imprisoned in the ceremonial of office. In her, law intertwines with compassion, and the law ceases to be something static to inhabit lived experience and interpretation.
Sorrentino himself has described it as “a love film.” But not a reassuring or ornamental love: rather, love as absence, as a question that digs and finds no definitive answer. Love for a lost wife, for children, for justice itself.
A fragile love, where words echo like condemnation from a prisoner to Dorotea: “You have never loved.” Here, fidelity and betrayal overlap, ethics corrupt and regenerate in the same instant. Servillo translates this tension into a gaze that seeks no consensus, but exposes the vulnerability of one who governs. Thus, love becomes inseparable from doubt, and doubt becomes the only authentic form of loyalty to another. Doubt as an ethical foundation.
What is impossible? To define the truth.
The work is rooted in this impossibility. Doubt is not a limit but the true beauty of grace. The film makes this evident: politics, with its claim to neutrality, never makes us immune to feelings. On the contrary, it is their theater, the space where justice intertwines with love, courage, responsibility, with the tragedy of the femicide of souls and the sacrifice of bodies.
Thus, La grazia takes shape as a moral and intimate manifesto, where life and death are not opposites but part of the same current that flows through those who decide and those who endure decisions.
The cities that serve as the backdrop—Turin, Milan, Rome, Mantua—are not decorative frames, but places that resonate like states of mind. The Castello del Valentino, the Egyptian Museum, Piazza di Spagna: each of these spaces becomes architecture of consciousness, an external projection of a man carrying within him the irresolvable fracture between faith and politics, between the desire for the absolute and the “historic compromise.”
Yet, at the heart of gravity, a flash of lightness appears. In a hilarious scene, his friend Coco bursts in with her vitality: a moment of breath that shows how lightness is not escape but a necessary condition to survive the weight of one’s role. Here arises the possibility of “recovering the sense of lightness,” of living the “absence of gravity” like an astronaut moved in space, seeing a tear float away with no chance of being wiped. An image that both fractures and wanders.
La grazia is a work that proceeds with both lightness and depth. Sorrentino chooses to tell the story of a man at the end of his journey, faced with deciding not between infinite options, but between two ultimate possibilities. It is in this reduction that the film finds its strength: in showing that life, in the end, always condenses into a few irrevocable choices.
Not everyone will find the same rhythm: those seeking fast entertainment may perceive slowness; those wary of symbolism may judge it excessive. But it is precisely in its metaphorical density that its necessity lies: La grazia does not aim to seduce, but to restore to the viewer the vertigo of a thought interrogating itself.
A film that does not shout, but remains, like a suspended prayer, like the weightless tear drifting in space: grace as the beauty of doubt.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms… illusions forgotten as illusions.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The movie by Below the Clouds is in the official competition of the Venice Film festival 2025.
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
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