La Grazia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the recurring shot the reviewers keep returning to: Mariano De Santis, President of Italy, framed small against the twinkling night skyline of Rome, sealed inside the Quirinale and inside his own deliberation. Critics called it an almost extraterrestrial isolation. It is the whole film in one composition — a man who can see everything and can act on almost nothing, watching a city he governs the way you'd watch weather through glass.

That gap between seeing and doing is exactly where Gilles Deleuze located a break in the history of cinema. Most movies run on what he called the action-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain — problem, decision, resolution. Deleuze's hunch, tracked through postwar European film, was that a certain kind of modern cinema lost faith in that circuit. Characters stop being able to react adequately to what they perceive. He named the condition the crisis of the action-image, and La Grazia is almost a laboratory specimen of it. The dossier says it plainly — 'a film of decisions, not actions.' De Santis has two clemency petitions and a euthanasia bill on his desk, and the drama is never whether he can do the thing. He obviously can; the pen is right there. The drama is that doing has become unbearable to think.

When action drains out, Deleuze says, what floods in is time itself, and a new kind of protagonist: the seer (voyant), someone who no longer acts but watches and endures. Servillo's Volpi-winning performance is built for this — economy, weariness, moral exhaustion legible in small gestures rather than declamation. Sorrentino, whose earlier men of power (Andreotti in Il Divo, Berlusconi in Loro) were creatures of appetite and maneuver, here strips the character down to a face doing the hardest work in the film, which is refusing to conclude. Those held close-ups are what Deleuze calls the affection-image, and more precisely a qualisign: an immobile, reflecting face that expresses a single sustained quality — here, contemplation under grief — instead of discharging feeling into a deed. Nothing happens on that face and everything does.

The spaces do the same withholding. D'Antonio drowns the interiors in black, isolating the figure against the night; the grandeur is held in reserve, deployed sparingly. Deleuze had a term for a setting that stops functioning as a stage for action and becomes pure affect — the any-space-whatever (espace quelconque), a place emptied or fragmented until it registers a mood rather than hosting a plot. The Quirinale here isn't a location where things get decided. It's a lightless interior that mirrors a stalled conscience back at the man inside it. This is a real inheritance, not a vibe: the black-starved rooms come straight out of Bertolucci's The Conformist, the figure-against-Rome melancholy out of La Dolce Vita, and the film knows it.

What gives the film its spine, though, is a genuinely undecidable problem, and Deleuze is unusually useful here. The President states his euthanasia bind as a syllogism: if I don't sign, I'm a torturer; if I sign, I'm a murderer. Both branches are true. There is no third premise that resolves it. Deleuze called this an encounter with the unthought — the moment cinema stops depicting a mind solving something and instead stages thought colliding with what it cannot think through. The two clemency cases work the same lever: parallel spouses who killed a partner, each pressuring the gap between what the law says and what mercy sees. This is close to what Deleuze named the powers of the false — not lying, but the deliberate suspension of any single true verdict, held open as the film's real subject. Grace, in the theological sense the Italian title puns on, is precisely a verdict that reason can't earn its way to.

And notice what Sorrentino gave up to get here. His signature is the montage attraction — the needle-drop, the tonal whiplash from solemnity to absurdist comedy, the operatic procession. Reviewers report those instincts are dialed way back, and where they surface (a Guè cameo, a techno pulse under a stately frame) they scrape against the elegiac imagery. That friction is the point of interest: a filmmaker whose whole grammar was the movement-image's shock-cut, forcing himself into the patience of the time-image. The tension you feel is a director arguing with his own reflexes.

The descent this film belongs to is Fellini's — 8½, that Deleuzian touchstone, gave cinema the powerful man weighing his life in paradoxes, reverie folded into deliberation, and La Grazia replays it at lower volume and colder temperature. What Sorrentino adds to the discourse is a demonstration that the presidential thriller can be evacuated of politics-as-plot entirely and rebuilt as a study of conscience under duration. The significance isn't a twist or a technique. It's the wager that the most cinematic thing a head of state can do is fail to decide, on camera, at length — and that we'll lean in. Watch it again for the face against Rome. That's not a man overlooking his kingdom. That's a seer, and the city is the thing he can no longer move.