From Academy and BAFTA Award–winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, La Grazia is a sweeping exploration of love, duty, and personal freedom. Toni Servillo – winner of the Best Actor Award at the 2025 Venice Film Festival – stars as Italy’s outgoing president, Mariano De Santis, navigating moral and personal crossroads with the help of his confidante and daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti). With Sorrentino’s signature poetic vision and an evocative soundtrack, this heartfelt masterwork is an intimate meditation on fatherhood, conscience, and the enduring question: who owns our days?
The Garden Cinema View:
Paolo Sorrentino’s best film in some years is also a return to familiar ground. Sharply dressed elder men in positions of influence and wealth facing an existential crisis is Sorrentino’s bread and butter, and here is a particularly refined example. Reuniting with his muse, the sparkling Toni Servillo, this portrait of the final months in office for a popular President of the Republic pits a stiff servant of the law against larger and intangible forces: faith, grace, and love. At times a wordy and weighty moral conundrum, La Grazia is given lightness by Sorrentino’s stylistic flourishes – lonely cigarette breaks scored by thumping Italo disco, a Portuguese dignitary caught in a slow motion storm. And whilst the film takes its time to find its conclusions, the payoff is satisfying and very moving.
