‘The Hand of God’ movie review: A beautiful meditation on the agony and ecstasy of being young

The different religions and their patron saints — football, film and Catholicism — jostle for space in Paolo Sorrentino’s intensely personal drama

Paolo Sorrentino’s achingly beautiful The Hand of God ends with a Neapolitan song by Pino Daniele, ‘Napule è’. The lyrics, “Naples is a thousand colours/ Naples is a thousand fears…” captures the essence of the film, which shows a gorgeous Naples, riven with laughter and tears. From the first scene where a distraught woman meets the little monk of traditional Neapolitan fairy tales, The Monaciello, in a cavernous room with a chandelier leaning on the floor, and the azure waters of the bay to the shot of a man suspended by ropes in a gallery and Mount Vesuvius quietly belching smoke in the background, Naples catches and captures the eye with its unpredictable grandeur and decay.

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An intensely personal film, the Academy-Award-winning Sorrentino was inspired to make the film after Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, in which the filmmaker explored his childhood in Mexico.