130 min | R | December 3, 2021 | Netflix
Paolo Sorrentino turns his own teenage years in 1980s Naples into a coming-of-age story about the moment a kid’s life splits in two. Diego Maradona is coming to play for Napoli. So is grief, and they arrive on the same wind.
Fabietto Schisa is a shy teenager in 1980s Naples who loves his sprawling family and worships Diego Maradona from a distance. He drifts through his days without ambition or direction. Then a sudden tragedy cracks his world open and forces him toward adulthood before he is ready. Paolo Sorrentino mines his own youth for this story, and the film is really about how loss and art rush in to fill the same empty space. The title comes from Maradona’s infamous goal, but the hand of God here is the cruel accident of who lives and who does not.
Filippo Scotti plays Fabietto with a watchful passivity that slowly hardens into resolve. He spends the first half mostly observing, and Scotti makes that watching feel like a boy storing up everything he sees. Toni Servillo plays his father Saverio with warmth and a banker’s easy charm that hides a secret. Teresa Saponangelo plays his mother Maria as a prankster who juggles oranges and holds the household together. Luisa Ranieri plays the troubled aunt Patrizia, an object of Fabietto’s desire and the film’s most volatile presence. Their family dinners crackle with overlapping voices and casual cruelty that feel lived rather than written.
Sorrentino writes and directs, and he trades the baroque excess of his earlier work for something quieter and more controlled. Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography frames Naples in deep blues and golden light, with wide shots that dwarf Fabietto against the sea and the city. The camera lingers on the bay and the empty apartments until the locations carry the weight of memory. Sorrentino stages one pivotal scene at a hospital with brutal stillness, letting the silence do the work. The film slows its rhythm in the second half, mirroring the way Fabietto’s noisy world goes quiet.
This is a memory film, and it carries the strengths and the limits of that form. The first half teems with comic family chaos and the second half empties out into solitude and the first stirrings of artistic vocation. The two halves do not always pull in the same direction, and the closing stretch leans on a film-about-film conversation that states its themes too plainly. Still, Sorrentino captures the specific texture of a Naples that no longer exists and a boy learning that cinema can hold what he cannot say out loud. The film is most alive when it watches its family rather than when it explains itself.