Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Hand of God
2021 · Paolo Sorrentino · The Hand of God on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how many relatives fill the frame at once. (staging)
Sorrentino stages the Schisa family as a teeming ensemble around tables, at the beach, in cars, a comic chorus of aunts, uncles, and eccentrics all talking over each other.
Payoff: The noise and crowding are the whole point. You need to feel how full this world is before anything happens to it.
Watch Fabietto watching everyone else instead of talking. (performance)
Filippo Scotti plays Fabietto as a boy who mostly observes, taking in his loud family the way you take in weather, rarely at the center of his own scenes.
Payoff: He is positioned at the edge of his own life from the start, which is worth watching for as the film goes on. In the reading: The seer (voyant). The reading calls a character who mainly watches rather than acts a seer, and Fabietto is built as one from the start.
Notice how small people look against the sea and sky. (camera)
D'Antonio frames solitary figures dwarfed by the Bay of Naples, water and horizon recurring again and again, in some of the film's quietest and most beautiful shots.
Payoff: The landscape keeps dwarfing the people in it, long before the story gives you a reason why that feels true.
Listen for the stadium crowd swelling whenever Maradona is mentioned. (sound)
The roar of the San Paolo stadium and the babble of family life are given equal weight in the sound design, football rendered as a citywide, collective delirium.
Payoff: Naples sounds like it is holding its breath over one man's arrival, and the film lets that sound carry real weight.
Notice the story moves through loose incidents with no clear plot. (structure)
Family lunches, sexual awakening, petty quarrels, absurd encounters pile up one after another without building toward an obvious goal, just texture accumulating scene by scene.
Payoff: You are watching a life get lived before you are watching a plot get told, which is a different kind of attention.
Once you have seen it
Notice how empty the rooms become after the accident. (setting)
The same apartment that was crowded with relatives in the first half empties out entirely once Fabietto's parents are gone, and the film lingers in that emptiness.
Payoff: The rooms stop being a setting for anything and become simply a place where an absence lives. In the reading: Any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). Deleuze calls a space that has stopped functioning as a setting an any-space-whatever, holding feeling instead of action.
Notice there was nothing Fabietto could have done differently. (structure)
Fabietto survives only because he stayed behind for a football match. The film gives him no missed action, no choice he failed to make, only an arbitrary absence.
Payoff: There is no decision to replay and no guilt he actually earned, only the fact that loving football happened to save his life. In the reading: Crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a story built on an event no act could have changed.
Notice the film's final stretch turns toward Fabietto making films. (structure)
In its last movement, the story quietly shifts from grief toward vocation, following Fabietto's pull toward cinema itself as a way of handling what happened to him.
Payoff: The film you are watching turns out to be the thing Fabietto eventually goes on to make, grief becoming the origin of the art.
Carry this in: Watch how often Fabietto sits at the edge of a room while someone else does the talking.