The Hand of God · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a table. Aunts and uncles, somebody shouting about somebody else's money, a plate going around, four conversations running at once, and off at the edge of it a teenager who says almost nothing. Fabietto Schisa takes in his family the way you take in weather. That is the first hour of The Hand of God, and it has almost no plot: a Neapolitan clan staged as a comic chorus, lunches and beach trips and quarrels, incidents that pile up without leading anywhere. The noise is the story. Then the film puts a knife through its own middle, and everything you learned to watch stops working.

Sorrentino's invention here is to let a style die on camera. He had spent a decade building a signature — roving camera, terrace-party tableaux, needle-drop montage, baroque irony — and The Great Beauty is the reference case. For this film he handed the camera to Daria D'Antonio, who had worked his crews for years, and she keeps it at the height of adolescent observation: family rooms watched patiently, sometimes voyeuristically, the crane-driven bravura mostly withheld. Then Fabietto's parents die of a carbon monoxide leak at the mountain house, and what remains of the grandeur drains out with them. Crowded rooms empty. The cutting slows. Silence is allowed to sit. The renunciation is the grief, and you feel it as a formal loss because you know what this director can do.

That break is the thing Gilles Deleuze spent two books describing. His rough division: in one kind of cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the acting works. That is the movement-image, the engine under almost every studio film. In the other kind, acting stops working. Deleuze called the hinge the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. The lens is worth granting here because this film is built on an impossibility of action so literal it is almost rude. Fabietto lives because he was not there. He stayed in Naples to see Maradona play; the gas killed his parents in the mountains. There is no act he failed to perform, and any act he might have performed would have killed him too. A whole film about an event whose entire meaning is that nobody could do anything.

Deleuze listed the symptoms of that crisis, and the first hour has most of them. The dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, none of them carrying a plot, a chorus of aunts and uncles and eccentrics whose scenes do not chain into causes. Episodes that transform nothing. This form has a source. Amarcord built the small-town memoir as a carnival of grotesque family and neighborhood vignettes organized by ritual rather than story, and that ensemble-chorus construction is what Sorrentino borrows outright; I Vitelloni gave him the seaside idleness of aimless young men and the one who finally leaves for the city, which is what Fabietto does when he goes to Rome. Fellini made plotlessness into a form. Sorrentino borrows the form and then detonates it, which Fellini never did.

After the detonation, Fabietto becomes what Deleuze calls a seer (voyant): a watcher and endurer instead of an agent. Filippo Scotti won Venice's Mastroianni Award for it, playing adolescence as arrested spectatorship, a boy watching his own life before he knows how to enter it. What he is given to watch are pure optical and sound situations, Deleuze's opsigns and sonsigns — moments where there is nothing to do but look and listen, and the film refuses to convert the looking into action. Long stretches are dead time, temps mort, where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. And the Schisa apartment becomes an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped functioning as the setting for anything, holding an absence where a family was. Same rooms. Different status entirely. The film's most beautiful images turn out to be its emptiest: a figure alone against the bay, dwarfed by sea and sky.

Two things keep this from being a sad boy in nice light. The first is how honestly Sorrentino handles the unreliability of his own memory. Exteriors run warm and sun-bleached, interiors shadowed; nobody would mistake this for documentary. Aunt Patrizia is staged at a pitch of near-mythic sensuality that blurs desire, fantasy and the frankly surreal — Deleuze's dream-image, the onirosign, a fantasy circuit with no dateable memory underneath it. She is not a flashback. She is what an adolescent's wanting does to a real woman, and the film never marks the border where the boy's seeing ends and his wanting starts.

The second is the title. Maradona's goal against England was a handball the referee did not see: an illegal thing that counted, and counts forever. Sorrentino names his own survival after it. This is Deleuze's powers of the false, the late idea that modern cinema stops delivering a true world and instead makes truth and falsity undecidable, treating that undecidability as a creative principle rather than a defect. We hold film to an old contract: something was in front of the camera, the image testifies, films do not lie. Sorrentino shot on the streets he actually grew up on, using actors to play his actual dead parents, and asked that contract to carry a private myth. Was he saved by grace, by football, or by a cheat? The film will not choose. It offers a cheat as the name for grace and leaves the guilt attached to it.

Which makes the closing turn honest rather than cute. The last movement is about the birth of an artist: the confrontation with Capuano, the nudge toward cinema, the memoir admitting out loud that it is the origin story of the film you are watching. Deleuze's word is fabulation, legending — a subject caught in the middle of telling himself into existence. Cinema Paradiso had already set the template for the Italian birth-of-a-filmmaker memoir, mentor's provocation and all, and Sorrentino restages it knowingly. What he changes is structural. In most films this death would be a third-act blow that accelerates everything toward resolution. Here it sits at the fulcrum, and rather than speeding the film up it brings it to a halt. Comedy of belonging in, elegy of orphaned solitude out. The catastrophe is a hinge, not a climax, and the whole rhythm reorganizes around it. That is the film's real contribution to narrative: it demonstrates that you can put the worst thing at the exact center and let the second half be quieter than the first.

One industrial fact belongs beside the aesthetic one. Netflix funded and platformed a Neapolitan-dialect memoir, the same prestige strategy that backed Roma, and most people met this film through a login rather than a cinema. A film about a boy watching his own life from the edge of the room, watched from the edge of a room.

Go back to the first hour and count how often Fabietto sits at the edge of the frame while someone else does the talking. That is not thin writing. It is a lens nobody has used yet, and the rest of the film is the world putting it to work.