‘Il disagio di stare al mondo’: Coming of Age, Masculinity, and Maradona in Paolo Sorrentino’s È stata la mano di Dio

ABSTRACT

With È stata la mano di Dio (2021), Paolo Sorrentino returned to filming in Naples, his hometown, 20 years after his first movie. Going back home is a moment of rupture in his production. ‘È stata la mano di Dio represents for the first time in my career an intimate and personal film’, Sorrentino explains. In this article I argue that the movie offers a self-reflexive reading of his origins as a director celebrating the primacy of Diego Armando Maradona’s influence on his work. Focusing on the protagonist Fabietto, Sorrentino’s cinematic alter ego, I examine the entanglements of his coming of age as a young man and the spectacle of Maradona’s transnational heroism, which inspires Fabietto’s decision to become a director. As a model of creativity and perseverance, Maradona illuminates the cinematic dialogue that Sorrentino establishes with his Neapolitan mentor Antonio Capuano and the Italian cinematic tradition embodied by Federico Fellini.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• coming of age
• Maradona
• transnational heroism
• fandom

All flights […] are from one exile to another.¹

Leslie Fiedler

Widely acclaimed by critics and the public, and having been awarded both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film for La grande bellezza (2013) in 2014, Paolo Sorrentino is quite possibly the most iconic contemporary Italian film director. His oeuvre has been examined within Italy’s historical and political context as well as through a transnational lens. His cinema is considered exemplary of the notion of ‘postmodern impegno’, introduced by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug, for adopting a postmodern aesthetic while examining Italian political history.² Sorrentino’s Il divo (2008) and Loro (2018) offer critical insights into Italian society, engaging with two of the most controversial figures of contemporary Italian history, namely Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi, respectively. Annachiara Mariani and Russell Kilbourn situate Sorrentino’s cinema in the context of contemporary transnational cinema.³ His first English-language film This Must Be the Place (2011) starred Sean Penn as the protagonist. Youth – La giovinezza (2015) with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda, set in the Swiss Alps, gained him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and two Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. The Young Pope (2016), Sorrentino’s first English-language Italian drama television series for HBO, Canal+, and Sky Atlantic, was cast with Jude Law and Diane Keaton. On the surface, these national and transcultural elements seem to be absent in his most recent movie, È stata la mano di Dio (2021). Indeed, even though it was distributed by the worldwide platform Netflix, its cast is primarily composed of Italian actors, mostly from Naples and the surrounding area. More importantly, È stata la mano di Dio signifies Sorrentino’s return to filming in Naples, the city of his birth, 20 years after his first movie, L’uomo in più (2001).

Rather than marking a return to known spaces, going home is a moment of rupture in Sorrentino’s production. ‘È stata la mano di Dio represents for the first time in my career an intimate and personal film’, Sorrentino explains, ‘a novel of formation at once light-hearted and painful’.⁴ The reference to a literary genre to describe a movie is of particular interest and reminds us that Sorrentino is also a published writer.⁵ In its representation of the development of Fabietto, a cinematic alter ego of Sorrentino, the movie focuses on ‘the formative process of a young person who becomes an adult’, much like coming-of-age novels, which emphasise the ‘inner lives and internal drives of their protagonists’.⁶ The death of his parents, losing his virginity, and his decision to become a director mark the formation of Fabietto, who embodies the male middle-class European protagonist of the traditional Bildungsroman.⁷ Much like Jude Law’s Pius XIII in The Young Pope, Fabietto’s youth subverts the typical Sorrentinean subject identified by Kilbourn as ‘white, male, heterosexual, mostly (but not always) European and of a certain age or generation’.⁸ The choice of starting an artistic career links the movie to a subgenre of the coming-of-age novel: the self-begetting novel, a work which represents ‘the development of a character to the point at which he is able to take up his pen and compose the novel we have just finished reading’.⁹ Inspired by Sorrentino’s formative years, the movie ends with Fabietto sitting on a train headed for Rome at the beginning of his artistic journey which would eventually lead to the filming of È stata la mano di Dio. Asked which scene would follow Fabietto’s train journey, Sorrentino said that the scene already existed: it was the beginning of La grande bellezza.¹⁰ In this regard, È stata la mano di Dio can be situated within the tradition of movies such as Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988), which Sorrentino regards as his biggest cinematic influences.¹¹ Comparing 8½ and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Millicent Marcus presents them as movies ‘about the process of liberation that the director undergoes in order to make the film we just saw [which] circles back on itself, ending at that point in the director-character’s own personal development when the making of his autobiographical work could finally begin’.¹² Drawing on these words, in this article I argue that È stata la mano di Dio offers a self-reflexive reading of Sorrentino’s origins as a director that situates Maradona’s transnational heroism as key to understanding Fabietto’s coming of age and his creative path. As a model of artistic practice combining creativity and perseverance, Maradona inspires Fabietto to transcend the tension between Naples and Rome and their respective affective and cinematic legacies. Naples is marked by Fabietto’s family history and the imperative to confront that suffering expressed by Antonio Capuano’s aesthetics, while Rome, Italy’s cinematic capital immortalised by Fellini, is the site in which to pursue his career as a director so as to transcend the pain caused by the loss of his parents. Interpreting Fabietto’s coming of age and mobility beyond a local/national lens, I contend that the gender dynamics characterising Fabietto’s trajectory towards directorship and his affective investment in Maradona illuminate Sorrentino’s cinematic aesthetics and his deeply personal readings of the figures of Capuano and Fellini.

Fabietto and Maradona: Transnational Heroism, Masculinity, and Alienation

Sport is a recurrent theme in Sorrentino’s production; references to Maradona and Napoli SFC appear consistently throughout his work.¹³ In his acceptance speech for the 2014 Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Movie, Sorrentino cited Maradona as his main inspiration, along with Fellini, Martin Scorsese, and the American band Talking Heads.¹⁴ The figure of Maradona plays a key role in È stata la mano di Dio, as is suggested by the title evoking his hand goal against England in the 1986 World Cup. Due to his global popularity, the Argentinian football player has been studied through a transnational lens. According to David Andrews and Steven Jackson, Maradona’s ‘nomadic football career’ should be seen in view of ‘local, national and supra-national constituencies’.¹⁵ Maradona emerged from a potrero (an uneven and irregular football pitch) in the slums of Santo Fiorino, one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, to become a global icon. He can be described in countless ways: a footballer, Argentina’s national hero, the idol of Naples, an international star, a genius, a rebel, an artist, a leader, a celebrity struggling with addiction, and a postmodern religious figure. He inhabited and, at the same time, transcended all these roles. Studying Maradona in relation to national discourses and the construction of masculinity in Argentina, Eduardo Archetti underscores how ‘Maradona was a global player, a nomad, living in a new age of football’ and was ‘a source of collective identity and pride in both national and supra-national settings and, paradoxically, very local settings – the cities of Naples or Barcelona, or a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires’.¹⁶ Archetti describes Maradona as illustrative of transnational heroism: he has inspired countless movies and documentaries such as Javier Vázquez’s Loving Maradona (2005), Carlos Sorín’s The Road to Saint Diego (2006), Ben and Gabe Turner’s In the Hands of the Gods (2007), Emir Kusturica’s Maradona by Kusturica (2008), Alessio Maria Federici’s Maradonapoli (2017), Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona (2019), and Angus Macqueen’s Maradona in Mexico (2019), spanning the respective countries of Argentina, Serbia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Mexico.

Marcus Free observes how ‘Maradona’s success […] was […] both geographically and economically symbolic, and it became intertwined with a romantic narrative’.¹⁷ Thanks to his technical skills and imagination on the pitch, Maradona epitomised the figure of the pibe [boy], an expression of pure talent that breaks away from the rigid tactics prescribed by a football coach. Having grown up in an impoverished neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, during the 1980s Maradona became the symbol of Napoli, the most representative team of Italy’s south, in competition with the economically wealthier northern Italian clubs.¹⁸ During his career, he often criticised football governance including Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), ‘fuelling his status as an icon of resistance to the game’s power hierarchy’ and shaping his image as a figure that challenged rules and established powers.¹⁹ After his retirement, Maradona positioned himself politically, advertising his friendship with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Nonetheless, despite displaying his political affiliation through tattoos of Che Guevara and Castro, Maradona existed as a pop communist icon within a neoliberal logic. In view of the concentration of economic interests surrounding Maradona and his career as a media personality and host of La noche del 10, Leandro Zanoni called him ‘Maradollar’.²⁰ Nicolás Salazar-Sutil looks at the Argentine as a corporate phenomenon, Maradona Inc.: ‘Maradona is hyperlinked beyond football-related sites, and onto markets where other cultural and subcultural currencies are exchanged’.²¹ Maradona existed simultaneously as his own brand and in opposition to neoliberal logic, inhabiting the local and global, the potrero and corporate football. A nomadic subject par excellence, mobilised by the colonial and capitalistic logic of the global football economy, Maradona and his sport performances play a crucial role in Fabietto’s coming of age.²²

Paraphrasing from John Thompson’s Media and Modernity (1995), Salazar-Sutil describes Maradona as ‘a paradigm of “non-local knowledge”, fixed in a material substratum, reproduced technically and transmitted via the media’.²³ Sorrentino himself has stressed the extent to which Maradona’s persona was embedded in the media: ‘[Maradona] belongs to the world of show business. When a sportsman is so astounding and astonishing, he is no longer merely an athlete, but an artist’.²⁴ Whilst Sorrentino’s previous movies contributed to the dissemination of Maradona as an icon in media culture, È stata la mano di Dio continues this legacy, all the while shedding light on the origins of Sorrentino’s emotional investment.²⁵ Maradona’s accomplishments are a structuring principle in the movie. The sense of time passing is portrayed by the events of Maradona’s career. The narration opens by focusing on his arrival in Naples in the summer of 1984, continues with his corner kick goal against Lazio in 1985 and Argentina’s victory in the 1986 World Cup, and progresses onto Napoli’s winning the Scudetto in May 1987. Evocative of Sorrentino’s own affective investment in Maradona and Napoli, È stata la mano di Dio seems to enact what Free describes as ‘the retrospective tracing of a logical biographical narrative’ exploring the relationship between the director’s biography and sporting events.²⁶ Sports events are entangled with Fabietto’s personal and family life. More specifically, the trajectory of Maradona in Naples offers a standpoint from which to examine Fabietto’s sense of non-belonging and how this is constructed in relationship to the men within and beyond his family.

Saverio, Fabietto’s father, is a well-established banker and an unfaithful husband who fathers another child outside of wedlock. He is sceptical about the fact that an international football star such as Maradona could move to Naples and join a team which is struggling at the bottom of Serie A, Italy’s professional football league. In contrast, zio Alfredo expresses his radical desire to see Maradona join Napoli: ‘Fabiè, io, se Maradona non viene a Napoli, mi uccido. Hai capito bene quello che ti ho detto? Io mi uccido!’. His fanatical investment in Maradona stems from his deep dissatisfaction towards his own lived experience. Listening to their family members talking about how unlikely it would be for Maradona to be signed by Napoli, zio Alfredo asks: ‘Ma quando avete cominciato a essere tutti così deludenti?’ Disappointment towards the outside world is a recurring theme in the movie, voiced by different characters including Fabietto and his inspirations, Fellini and Capuano, as I will address in the following pages.

The news that Maradona has signed for Napoli reaches Fabietto when his family is living through a somewhat dramatic moment: his mother, Maria, has received a call from Saverio’s lover and, on hearing his mother’s reaction, Fabietto starts hyperventilating. Despite being a nostalgic evocation of the past, È stata la mano di Dio frames the traditional Italian family as a haven as well as a site of conflict and trauma. On the day of his birthday, Fabietto visits his father, who had been temporarily banned from the home due to his infidelity, at work. When Saverio asks about his birthday plans, Fabietto confesses he does not have a girlfriend or friends. His solitude seems to explain the deeper impact that his parents’ marital troubles have on him in comparison to his brother. Just before giving his son his birthday present, a season ticket to watch Maradona play with Napoli, Saverio advises Fabietto to lose his virginity as soon as possible: ‘Però segui un consiglio importante. La prima volta … la prima volta, prendi quello che ti capita. Hai capito? Non andare tanto per il sottile. Pure nu cesso va bene. Ma bisogna togliersi dal cazzo ‘sta prima volta, hai capito a papà?’. Whether this advice is intended to liberate Fabio from the moral strictures of the romance narrative to which he seems prone, or to encourage him to enter the realm of heterosexual sex to fulfil his manhood, Saverio’s words are an invitation to objectify women. Saverio embodies a model of masculinity that Fabietto cannot inhabit. Although he never voices his distance from such patriarchal conceptions of sexuality, Fabietto is more interested in seeing Maradona play for Napoli than in sex. When his brother Marchino, taunting him, asks Fabietto: ‘Se tu dovessi scegliere tra Maradona al Napoli e chiavare con zia Patrizia, cosa sceglieresti?’, he replies ‘Maradona’.

As a young man, Fabietto oscillates between the memories of his childhood and the expectations of adulthood. For his birthday he asks his mother to cook ‘zuppa di latte’ (milk porridge), a dish that reminds him of his childhood nights: when his father went to Milan for work, he would have ‘zuppa di latte’ and then sleep with his mother in his parents’ bed. Fabietto’s infantilisation is such that Maria suggests he should hide in the wardrobe like he used to do as a child when they played hide and seek, a suggestion Fabietto dismisses with anger. The evening spent with his mother also marks the distance between Fabietto and Marchino, whom Maria is sure will miss their family dinner after seeing him earlier with a beautiful girl. Fabietto’s isolation from heteronormative affectivity is emphasised by the match between Argentina and England in the 1986 FIFA World Cup. After Fabietto and his family celebrate Maradona’s goal, the camera shows how they are positioned in the elongated space of the balcony: Marchino is at the back of the balcony with his girlfriend sitting on his lap, while Fabietto’s parents are in front of them as shown in Figure 1. The image captures the moment in which Saverio holds Maria’s hand after kissing her. Fabietto sits in the middle, next to zio Alfredo. Immediately, after they have taken a seat, Fabietto looks at his brother sitting behind him and kissing his girlfriend. He is interrupted by Alfredo who grabs his arm and comments on Maradona’s goal: ‘Con la mano! Quel Dio ha segnato con la mano! Ha vendicato il grande popolo argentino, vessato dall’ignobile aggressione imperialista alle Malvinas. È un genio! Un genio! È un atto politico. È la rivoluzione! Li ha umiliati, capisci? Li ha umiliati!’. Reading Maradona’s hand goal as a political act in response to the Falklands war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982, Alfredo regards it as a form of resistance and artistic creation. This reading is reminiscent of Maradona’s own interpretation according to which the hand goal was a symbolic revenge for losing the war.²⁷ Silently, Fabietto endorses Alfredo’s interpretation, marking their affinity. The camera then closes in on Saverio and Maria holding hands, re-establishing affectivity within the nuclear family previously disrupted by Saverio’s infidelity. Framed between moments of heterosexual affection, the symbolic and political reading of Maradona’s hand goal reinforces the sense that Fabietto’s alternative gaze on the world is at the heart of his solitude as well as his alienation from heterosexual love.

Figure 1. Fabietto and his family watching Argentina England.

Forced into adulthood by the tragic death of his parents, Fabietto is left alone with the burden of self-definition. In his discussion of Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place and novel Hanno tutti ragione (2010), Cangiano examines the absence of paternal figures who teach their offspring how to interpret reality.²⁸ The scholar suggests that ‘what allows the subject to define himself and give himself meaning (and therefore a meaning of reality) centres on the immanent substitutes for this transcendent dead God: the father and mother’.²⁹ In È stata la mano di Dio, after the loss of his parents, Fabietto chooses Maradona as his guiding principle. The Argentine is at the centre of the conversation between Fabietto and Alfredo during the burial of Maria and Saverio. After learning that Fabietto did not go with his parents to the chalet in Roccaraso because – in his words – he had to watch Maradona play in the match between Napoli and Empoli (‘“c’era il Napoli allo stadio, dovevo vedere Maradona”’), Alfredo states: ‘È stato lui! È stato lui che ti ha salvato! [..] È stato lui! È stata la mano di Dio!’. In Alfredo’s eyes, Maradona is endowed with neo-spiritual power. The title of the movie is far more than just a reference to the hand goal against England; it also emphasises the salvific role that Maradona played in Fabietto’s life. The mystical dimension projected onto Maradona is addressed by Sorrentino in an interview that formed part of a Netflix special dedicated to È stata la mano di Dio: ‘Maradona si può solamente comprendere attraverso il rapporto con il divino’.³⁰ Evocative of the intense emotional attachment among Argentinian fans that led to the foundation of the Church of Maradona in Argentina, Alfredo and Fabietto’s affective investment in Maradona sublimates the Argentinian star into ‘a figure of cult’.³¹ As for his football career, Maradona’s figure conflates seemingly antithetical plans in the movie: on the one hand, he emerges as a mystical figure; on the other, he is exemplary of the devotion that an artist should have to his craft. This materialises in the dialogue between Fabietto and Marchino after their parents’ burial. Still wearing formal clothes, they go to see Napoli’s training session and watch Maradona practising free kicks. When Fabietto asks Marchino – who wants to become an actor and auditioned for Fellini – ‘Non ci provi più a fare l’attore?’, Marchino replies: ‘Troppo difficile il cinema, Fabie’. Poi bisognerebbe andare a Roma’. Situating Rome in opposition to Naples, Marchino stresses its role as Italy’s cinematic capital – celebrated by Fellini in La dolce vita and Sorrentino himself in La grande bellezza – and the site of international recognition. Presenting mobility from the periphery to the centre as the condition for success, Marchino’s words foreshadow the contrast between Rome and Naples articulated by the fictional version of Capuano in the movie. Then Marchino adds, ‘Sai come si chiama questa cosa che ha fatto Maradona? […] Si chiama perseveranza. Io non ce l’avrò mai e tu devi avercela per forza’. For the first time, the movie acknowledges Maradona’s commitment to his art. Perseverance is thus presented as the key to success. Consistent with other Sorrentino movies, football ‘constitutes a metaphor for existence’.³² Fabietto’s reading of Maradona as a model of dedication both contrasts with the Argentinian national discourses of identity shaped around Maradona and, at the same time, enriches them. Thanks to his mythical position within the Argentinian popular imagination, Maradona was crucial in the construction of Argentinian masculinity as the epitome of the pibe’s undisciplined, impromptu, effortless and individualistic style symbolised by the potrero.³³ However, for Fabietto and Marchino, the repetitive exercises through which Maradona perfected his natural skills on the training pitch reveal freedom and creativity as the result of continuous practice and dedication. The transnational heroism of Maradona emerges as a shifting signifier that Fabietto re-imagines in the light of his family history. In the following sections, I examine how the meaning of the figure of Maradona is intertwined with aunt Patrizia’s hallucinations informed by Neapolitan-folklore as well as with the urge to transcend a disappointing everyday life expressed by Fellini’s oeuvre.

Patrizia and Fellini: National Cinematic Tradition and Local Hallucinations

Supernatural characters, including Sister Maria in La grande bellezza, the monk in Youth, and the Pope in The Young Pope, are recurrent in Sorrentino’s work.³⁴ The magical is also present in È stata la mano di Dio, informed as it is by Neapolitan folklore. The movie opens with the meeting between Patrizia, the other key figure in Fabietto’s youth in addition to Maradona, and San Gennaro. Sitting in the back of a car, the saint offers Patrizia a ride. He takes her to his place to introduce her to the mysterious monaciello. Patrizia is invited to kiss the head of the monaciello for good luck: when she does, he touches her bottom inappropriately, saying that she is now able to bear children, while the monaciello puts money in her bag. However, this surreal narrative is challenged by Franco, Patrizia’s husband, who accuses her of having received money in exchange for sex. We learn from Saverio, who tries to calm Franco down, that Patrizia’s mental health issues are triggered by her infertility. From this perspective, the hallucinatory meeting with San Gennaro and the monaciello reveals her suffering at not being able to have children, in addition to the gender-based violence to which she is subjected.

As a liminal character, Patrizia disrupts the verisimilitude of the other events narrated in the movie and reveals the tension between different ontologies, the magical and the real. Patrizia is hypersexualised across these different ontologies. In her first appearance, she wears a white summer dress, which emphasises the form of her nipples. Her body is positioned as the object of the male gaze (Figure 2).³⁵ Even in a moment of extreme vulnerability, when she is still bleeding after being beaten by her husband, both Fabietto and Saverio stare at her uncovered breast (Figure 3). Mesmerised, father and son are petrified by her nudity and stop looking at her only after Maria intervenes. The epitome of the objectification of Patrizia’s body is the scene on the boat when she sunbathes naked (Figure 4). Commenting on Sorrentino’s movies, Daniele Hipkins underscores how ‘the female is merely a fetish object for the narration of male desire’.³⁶ È stata la mano di Dio seems to conform to this trend, with all the men in Fabietto’s family staring intensely at Patrizia’s naked body. However, her body is also a site of contention as expressed by the judgemental and dissatisfied looks in the eyes of the women in Fabietto’s family. Reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), Patrizia’s pubic hair is the focal point of the shot, revealing the entanglements between the reification of the female body and the male fantasy shaping this representation. While in La grande bellezza and Youth the idealisation of female beauty exacerbates older men’s sense of impending death, Patrizia’s body emerges as an object of contemplation that reiterates Fabietto’s distance from adult sexuality and, at the same time, intensifies the patriarchal logic behind this expression of heterosexual desire.³⁷ As a self-reflection on Sorrentino’s journey towards directorship, È stata la mano di Dio offers a frame within which to interpret the influence of Italian cinematic imagination on Fabietto. The fetishisation of Patrizia is consistent with the representation of women in Sorrentino’s other movies, which have been linked to ‘a certain Italian cinematic tradition of objectifying goddess figures’ and an expression of Fellini’s influence in particular.³⁸ According to Kilbourn, Sorrentino’s intertextual engagement with Fellini’s problematic objectification of women is ambivalent: Sorrentino’s self-reflexive examination of the male gaze addresses the practices of reification in Italian cinema, ‘inscribing a critique while amplifying the spectacle’.³⁹

Figure 2. San Gennaro looks at Patrizia through the car window.

Figure 3. Saverio and Fabietto look at Patrizia. Sorrentino (dir.), È stata la mano di Dio, 2021.

Figure 4. Patrizia sunbathing. Sorrentino (dir.), È stata la mano di Dio, 2021.

The influence of Fellini is explicitly acknowledged in È stata la mano di Dio when Marchino auditions for a role as an extra in a Fellini movie. While waiting for his brother, Fabietto walks towards the room where Fellini is casting. Although the director is never shown, his voice is clearly audible. He is giving instructions to his collaborators who are pinning pictures of actresses onto two big pinboards, creating the imaginary of female beauty that populates Sorrentino’s movies. While initially Fabietto seems to be fascinated by this myriad of pictures, what resonates more deeply in him are the words that his brother heard Fellini say during a phone interview: ‘La realtà è scadente’. The words attributed to Fellini are evocative of Sorrentino’s reading of 8½ as a movie about ‘il disagio di stare al mondo’, the discomfort of being in the world.⁴⁰

The fetishisation of female beauty by Fellini is presented as a coping mechanism, a culturally promoted, national misogynistic supplement within which Fabietto’s alienation reverberates. Even though in È stata la mano di Dio the exposure of the reification of female beauty and its rootedness in the Italian cinematic tradition is neither emancipatory nor critical, the depiction of Patrizia is composite. Not only does it gravitate around her suffering, but it also focuses on the affinity between Patrizia and Fabietto. Fabietto’s search for a way to evade his own lived experience is influenced by both the dissatisfaction with reality that lies at the heart of Fellini’s cinema as well as in Patrizia’s hallucinations. On their way home after the casting, Marchino and Fabietto comment on Fellini’s disdain towards reality. While the brothers are talking, Maradona is shown driving in Naples. The significance of his first appearance in the city is signalled by a time-still sequence. In one of the Netflix specials produced for the release of the movie, Sorrentino emphasises that ‘Maradona didn’t come but appeared in Naples’.⁴¹ As a neo-religious figure, the Argentinian player reveals himself to Napoli supporters and joins the monaciello and San Gennaro within the saint-worshipping culture of Naples.⁴² As objects of devotion, they become the protagonists of the fantasies through which Patrizia and Fabietto process their dissatisfaction with their lived experience: Fabietto’s isolation is mirrored by Patrizia’s desperation. Afraid that she could take her own life, Patrizia asks her family if she could be admitted to a psychiatric ward. When Fabietto visits her, she recounts that she got pregnant just like San Gennaro had promised but miscarried a few days later after being beaten by her husband. Fabietto tells her that he believed her account of the meeting with San Gennaro and the monaciello. Fabietto’s embracing of her fantasies is revelatory of their intimate connection which frames Patrizia as a creative influence, alongside Maradona and Fellini. It is to her that Fabietto confesses his desire to become a film director for the first time: ‘È un’idea pazza. […] Il regista di film. Questo vorrei fare’. Mocking her own mental health, Patrizia reassures him that she is the ideal interlocutor for listening to crazy ideas. The dialogue strengthens their proximity and, at the same time, exacerbates the gendered inflections of their fantasies. While Patrizia is trapped in the trope of the mad woman, Fabietto’s wild idea is framed as a quest for creativity.

After expressing his desire out loud for the first time with Patrizia, Fabietto’s metaphorical journey towards becoming a director begins. He enters adult sexuality through the loss of his virginity – which, according to his father, was a burden to his manhood – with the old Baronessa living upstairs. As noted by Kilbourn, though the movie is autobiographical, this scene is inspired by Sorrentino’s novel Hanno tutti ragione, in which the protagonist Tony Pagoda loses his virginity to the baroness Eleonora Fonseca.⁴³ Introducing Fabietto to sex in the movie, the Baronessa plays a more pedagogical role than her literary counterpart, who makes Tony try cocaine for the first time after intercourse. The Baronessa, who seems to have internalised a gerontophobic perception of her ageing body, nostalgically evokes the nickname that her husband gave to her vulva, ‘super fessa’.⁴⁴ Her body is presented as an object of attraction and abjection at the same time.⁴⁵ During sex, she invites Fabietto to imagine that he is making love to a girl he likes. When the Baronessa asks for her name, he replies ‘Patrizia’, framing his aunt as the object of an impossible love that he could only live through his fantasies. While the couple has sex, the camera closes in on the remote control on the bedside table as shown in Figure 5. The Baronessa tells Fabietto that he needs to supplement his bodily experience with his imagination. Comparing their intercourse to a television show, Fabietto must imagine the programme that is being broadcast. An extension of his heterosexual desire as a young man, his imagination is to be channelled through cinematic or televised images.

Figure 5. Fabietto and the Baronessa have sex. Sorrentino (dir.), È stata la mano di Dio, 2021.

‘Ho visto Maradona’: Between Fulfilment and Evasion

Uncertain about how to pursue a career in cinema, Fabietto approaches the unorthodox Neapolitan director Capuano, whom he sees criticising an actress in the middle of her performance in a play, for guidance. The choice of Capuano as a mentor is rooted in Sorrentino’s biography, as he worked for Capuano when he was young. Capuano is regarded as one of the key directors of the new Neapolitan school of film-making, along with Mario Martone and Pappi Corsicato, who in the early 1990s subverted the subjects and style of Neapolitan cinema of the previous decades.⁴⁶ Capuano’s movies such as Vito e gli altri (1991), Pianese Nunzio, 14 anni a maggio (1996), and La guerra di Mario (2006) focus on the difficult upbringing of children and adolescents in Naples.⁴⁷ Even if, in his interviews, Capuano has denied any anthropological or sociological ambition, critics such as Marlow-Mann, O’Healy, and La Trecchia emphasise the social commitment of his works in denouncing the living conditions of those on the margins of society in Naples.⁴⁸ È stata la mano di Dio does not offer a composite depiction of Capuano, but rather a personal and fragmentary interpretation of his character as an antithesis to the disengagement with reality evoked by Fellini’s words (‘La realtà è scadente’).

In their conversation, Fabietto explains to Capuano that he plans to move to Rome with the aim of working in the film industry: ‘La vita, ora che la mia famiglia si è disintegrata, così com’è, non mi piace più. Non mi piace più! Ne voglio un’altra, immaginaria, uguale a quella che tenevo prima. La realtà, non mi piace più. La realtà è scadente. Ecco perché voglio fare il cinema!’. Placing his suffering for the loss of his parents at the heart of his decision to become a director, Fabietto articulates his urge to distance himself from his experience, in line with Alfredo’s and Fellini’s dissatisfaction. However, Fabietto’s plan is met with resistance by Capuano:

Roma? La fuga? So’ palliativi ‘ro cazz’! Alla fine torni sempre a te, Schisa. E torni qua! Torni al fallimento. Perché è tutto un fallimento. Tutto una cacata! ‘E capit’? Nessuno inganna il proprio fallimento. E nessuno se ne va veramente da questa città. A Roma? A c’ cazz’ ci vai a fa’ a stu Roma? Solo ‘e strunz’ vann’ a Roma, ma hai visto quanti cose ‘a raccuntà c’stanno int’ a sta città? Guarda!

According to Capuano, moving to Rome is only an illusory solution – no one can escape their own failure. As discussed in relation to Marchino’s words, Rome is not only the cinematic capital immortalised by Fellini but also an intertextual link to La grande bellezza. The dialogue between Fabietto and Capuano seems to be a commentary on Sorrentino’s filmography, an attempt to explain his twenty-year separation from Naples, as well as his decision to return there to film. In hindsight, È stata la mano di Dio is testament to the geographical and temporal distance needed to narrate loss. When Capuano energetically and repeatedly asks Fabietto if he has anything to narrate that is inspired by Naples, Fabietto talks about the fact that he was not allowed to see the bodies of his parents: the geography of Naples is marked by the history of his family, including the tragedy that irremediably tore apart his life.

Capuano is touched by Fabietto’s words. Stepping out from his role as a histrionic and radical director, he addresses Fabietto by his first name rather than his surname. When the young man comments that he is known as Fabietto by everybody, Capuano tells him that from now on he should have people use his first name without alteration: the abandonment of the diminutive of his name marks another step towards adulthood. The change of tone is also marked by Capuano’s switch to Italian. ‘Non ti disunire, Fabio’. His paternal advice is borrowed from football jargon. ‘Non disunirsi’ is an imperative for any football team to stay close together and maintain control when the opponent is leading. Translated from football to directing, the idea of control is pivotal in the construction of masculinity and crucial for maintaining authorial control.⁴⁹ The art of directing is thus connected to the ability to control one’s emotions – an imperative which, in hindsight, Patrizia could not live up to.

In the scene following his dialogue with Capuano, Fabietto is standing alone and looking at his bedroom. As the camera pans across his room, we see the poster of Maradona giving the illusion that hero and disciple are standing side by side. The audio of a reporter interviewing Maradona after the victory of the scudetto along with the Napoli supporters’ chant ‘Ho visto Maradona’ come from the television. Fabietto turns it off and leaves the house, while the camera stays on the VHS of the Italian version of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Fabietto walks to the psychiatric ward where his aunt is staying to say goodbye. Figure 6 shows aunt and nephew looking at each other through the window bars of the ward, whilst in the background we can hear the iconic Italian sports journalist Bruno Pizzul commenting on Napoli’s victory. Patrizia throws a battery from the window that she stole at the beginning of the movie. Fabietto kneels to pick it up. As he gets up, we hear the commentary on Maradona’s second goal against England by Uruguayan journalist and football commentator Víctor Hugo Morales Pérez. Morales Pérez’s ecstatic narration of what is regarded as the best goal in football history has become a cult for football fans all over the world and the foundational text of Maradona’s transnational profane hagiography. When Fabietto looks up again towards his aunt, she is gone. The oscillation between the images of Fabietto’s family and the sound of Maradona’s gesture continues. While Naples is celebrating the victory of Serie A, Fabietto’s sister Daniela finally walks out of the bathroom, through the corridor, and towards the camera. Her face is distorted by pain and tears, while in the background the chant in Spanish invented by the Argentinian national team’s supporters during the 2018 World Cup in Russia is audible, almost 25 years after Maradona’s last national appearance. In his article written before the release of È stata la mano di Dio, Bauer observes that in Sorrentino’s movies ‘football […] creates a link between the past and the present of certain characters, and most probably also of the director himself’.⁵⁰ Moving beyond the temporal horizon of Fabietto’s narrative arc in the movie, ending in 1987, È stata la mano di Dio shows how Maradona’s football performances still reverberate in Sorrentino’s life as well as in the memories of football supporters around the globe and across generations. The image of Daniela from 1987 and the sound of the 2018 chant connect like the two sides of a Möbius strip: this temporal and geographical violation shows how the ramifications of Fabietto’s pain for the loss of his parents echo in the Argentinian supporters’ nostalgic evocation of Maradona. A unifying element, the figure of Maradona connects football supporters globally and locally, without homogenising their experience, but rather intersecting with their individual narratives. Evoked through a collage of images, commentaries, and chants, the global spectacle of Maradona illuminates Fabietto’s intimate experience of loss and growth.

Figure 6. Fabietto and Patrizia look at each other.

Conclusion

In the final scene of the movie, Fabietto has left Naples and is travelling to Rome. When the train stops at a local station, Fabietto sees the monaciello that Patrizia met through the window. The little monk shows his face, and we see how he resembles Maradona as a boy. The appropriation of the fantasies that were detrimental to Patrizia’s life marks the rise of Fabietto’s authorial control. In light of the intertextual dialogue the movie establishes with Sorrentino’s biography, one could argue that Fabietto is on his way to becoming an internationally acclaimed director, much like the men who inspired him, including Fellini. Though this hints at a young man’s fulfilment within a patriarchal destiny, È stata la mano di Dio seems to escape sublimation into a fixed monolithic identity. Fabietto is shown on a train leaving his hometown in a moment of transition and becoming, while he is listening to Pino Daniele’s nostalgic song ‘Napule è’ (1977).⁵¹ This is the first time we can hear the music Fabietto is listening to. The song is dedicated to the city he needs to leave but cannot stop inhabiting. Fabietto’s coming of age depicts the paradoxical continuum of belonging and non-belonging.

È stata la mano di Dio transcends the binary opposition between engagement and disengagement, the determination to confront reality and the urge to evade pain, which are personified respectively by the characters of Capuano and Fellini and projected onto the geographical and cinematic spaces of Naples and Rome. As a reflection on Sorrentino’s path as a director, È stata la mano di Dio offers a genealogy of Sorrentino’s main cinematic influences, while emphasising the primacy of Maradona over any other cinematic inspiration. In this heartfelt tribute to the dissolution of the director’s family, Fabietto’s personal version of the monaciello as a young Maradona brings to light the proximity of the transnational and the local in È stata la mano di Dio.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 84.

² Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug proposed the notion of ‘postmodern impegno’ in their edited volume Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 1–29. For a discussion of realism and postmodernism in Sorrentino’s work see Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Di crisi in meglio: Realismo, impegno postmoderno e cinema politico nell’Italia degli anni zero: da Nanni Moretti a Paolo Sorrentino’, Italian Studies, 67.2 (2013), 169–87; Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘The Ambiguity of Realism and its Posts: A Response to Millicent Marcus’, The Italianist, 30.2 (2010), 258–62; Millicent Marcus’s, ‘The Ironist and the Auteur: Post-realism in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo’, The Italianist, 30.2 (2010), 245–57.

³ Annachiara Mariani, ‘Paolo Sorrentino: A Transcultural and Post-national Auteur’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 7.3 (2019), 331–38; Russell Kilbourn, ‘The “Primal Scene”: Memory, Redemption and “Woman” in the Films of Paolo Sorrentino’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 7.3 (2019), 377–94.

⁴ Rolling Stone, ‘Paolo Sorrentino dirigerà È stata la mano di Dio per Netflix’, Rolling Stone, 8 July 2020 <https://www.rollingstone.it/cinema-tv/news-cinema-tv/paolo-sorrentino-dirigera-e-stata-la-mano-di-dio-per-netflix/523936/> [accessed 5 April 2023].

⁵ Sorrentino wrote two novels, Hanno tutti ragione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010) and Gli aspetti irrilevanti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2016), the collection of short stories Tony Pagoda e i suoi amici (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2012), and Il peso di Dio: Il vangelo di Lenny Belardo (Turin: Einaudi, 2017), a volume collecting speeches, prayers, homilies by the protagonist of The Young Pope. Regarding the genre of the Bildungsroman in cinema, see Anne Hardcastle, Roberta Morosini, and Kendall Tarte, ‘Introduction’, in Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema, ed. by Anne Hardcastle, Roberta Morosini, and Kendall Tarte (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 1–11.

⁶ Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, Children of Globalisation: Diasporic Coming-of-Age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), p. 4.

⁷ Quintana-Vallejo, p. 4.

⁸ Kilbourn, ‘The “Primal Scene”’, p. 381.

⁹ Steven Kellman, The Self-Begetting Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 3.

¹⁰ When asked by Alessandra De Luca, ‘Se dovessi girare la scena che segue quella finale del film, con Fabietto sul treno per Roma, che cosa racconterebbe?’, Sorrentino answers: ‘La scoperta di Roma. Ma è una scena che ho già raccontato, con un film intero, La grande bellezza.’ Alessandra De Luca, ‘È stata la mano di Dio, intervista a Paolo Sorrentino’, Ciak, 24 Novembre 2021 <https://www.ciakmagazine.it/news/incontri/e-stata-la-mano-di-dio-intervista-a-paolo-sorrentino/> [accessed 18 September 2023].

¹¹ Sorrentino describes 8½ as ‘il film che forse mi ha più ispirato […], una specie di film perfetto’ and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso as ‘un film che ho visto da ragazzo che mi ha fatto innamorare del cinema […] un grandissimo omaggio di amore al cinema’ (Il film che ha fatto amare i film a Paolo Sorrentino, Netflix, 2021).

¹² Millicent Marcus, ‘Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso and the Art of Nostalgia’, in After Fellini (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 199–213 (p. 209).

¹³ For a discussion of sport in Sorrentino’s movies, see Thomas Bauer, ‘From Maradona to Jude Law: Sport in Paolo Sorrentino’s Movies’, Studies in European Cinema, 18.1 (2021), 60–75.

¹⁴ Simona Santoni, ‘Oscar 2014, il discorso di Paolo Sorrentino’, Panorama, 3 March 2014 <https://www.panorama.it/lifestyle/oscar-2014-grande-bellezza-discorso> [accessed 15 August 2023].

¹⁵ David Andrews and Steven Jackson, ‘Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture, and Private Experience’, in Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, ed. by David Andrews and Steven Jackson (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–19 (p. 14).

¹⁶ Eduardo Archetti, ‘The Spectacle of a Heroic Life: The Case of Diego Maradona’, in Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, ed. by David Andrews and Steven Jackson (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 151–63 (p. 154).

¹⁷ Marcus Free, ‘Diego Maradona and the Psychodynamics of Football Fandom in International Cinema’, Celebrity Studies, 5.1–2 (2014), 197–212 (p. 199).

¹⁸ Carmen Rial, ‘“El Diego de la gente”: The Most Human of the Football Gods’, Eracle, 4.2 (2022), 16–36 (pp. 22–23); Vittorio Dini, ‘Maradona, héros napolitain’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 103 (June 1994), 75–78.

¹⁹ Free, p. 199.

²⁰ Leandro Zanoni, Vivir en los Medios: Maradona Off the Record (Buenos Aires: Editorial Marea. Zanoni, 2007), p. 16.

²¹ Nicolás Salazar-Sutil, ‘Maradona Inc.: Performance Politics Off the Pitch’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11.4 (2008), 441–58 (p. 445).

²² Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

²³ Salazar-Sutil, p. 211.

²⁴ Paolo Sorrentino, ‘Behind the Scenes/Interview with the director’, in La giovinezza/Youth, 2015 [on DVD].

²⁵ Bauer, pp. 60–75.

²⁶ Free, p. 204.

²⁷ Maradona said ‘[i]t was a nice feeling like some sort of symbolic revenge against the English’. See Diego Maradona, dir. by Asif Kapadia (On the Corner, 2019).

²⁸ Mimmo Cangiano, ‘Against Postmodernism: Paolo Sorrentino and the Search for Authenticity’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 7.3 (2019), 339–49 (p. 342).

²⁹ Ibid., p. 342.

³⁰ È stata la mano di Dio: Attraverso gli occhi di Sorrentino, Netflix, 2021.

³¹ Salazar-Sutil, ‘Maradona Inc’, p. 445. The foundation of the Church of Maradona has been object of the attention of the press. See: Jonathan Franklin, ‘He Was Sent from Above’, The Guardian, 12 November 2008 <https://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/nov/12/diego-maradona-argentina> [accessed 12 April 2023]; Ryan Dube, ‘Maradona Devotees Created Their Own Church for Hero Worship’, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2021 <https://www.wsj.com/articles/maradona-devotees-created-their-own-church-for-hero-worship-11610304133> [accessed 12 April 2023].

³² Bauer, p. 66.

³³ Eduardo Archetti, ‘El potrero y el pibe. Territorio y pertenencia en el imaginario del fútbol argentino’, Horizontes Antropológicos, 14.30 (July-December 2008), 259–82; Archetti, ‘The Spectacle of a Heroic Life’, pp. 154–58.

³⁴ Simor Eszter and David Sorfa, ‘Irony, Sexism and Magic in Paolo Sorrentino’s Films’, Studies in European Cinema, 14.3 (2017), 200–15.

³⁵ Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6–18.

³⁶ Danielle Hipkins, ‘Why Italian Film Studies Needs a Second Take on Gender’, Italian Studies, 63.2 (2008), 213–34 (pp. 213–14).

³⁷ Jonathan Romney, ‘Tragedies of Ridiculous Men’, Sight and Sound, 17.4 (April 2007), 40–42.

³⁸ Kilbourn, ‘The “Primal Scene”’, pp. 377–94. Jonathan Romney, ‘Film of the Week: Youth’, Film Comment, 10 December 2015 <http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-of-the-week-youth> [accessed 16 April 2023].

³⁹ Kilbourn, ‘The “Primal Scene”’, p. 380.

⁴⁰ Konbini, ‘Le Vidéo Club de Paolo Sorrentino à l’occasion de son film La Main de Dieu’, Konbini, 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgqnsTS347I > [accessed 16 April 2023].

⁴¹ È stata la mano di Dio: Attraverso gli occhi di Sorrenti.

⁴² Frank Graziano, Cultures of Devotion: Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁴³ Russell Kilbourn, ‘Film Review: È stata la mano di Dio/The Hand of God by Paolo Sorrentino’, gender/sexuality/italy, 9 (2022) <http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/20-e-stata-la-mano-di-dio> [accessed 16 April 2023].

⁴⁴ Amelia De Falco, Uncanny Subjects: Ageing in Contemporary Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010).

⁴⁵ Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

⁴⁶ Alex Marlow-Mann, The New Neapolitan Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

⁴⁷ For a discussion of childhood and adolescence in Capuano’s cinema see: Ella Ide, ‘Boys as Icons of Movement, Potential and Desire in Contemporary Melodramas of Boyhood’, in New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema, ed. by Danielle Hipkins and Roger Pitt (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 285–306; Patrizia La Trecchia, ‘Sites of “Glocal” Representations and Artistic Resistance: the Neapolitan Urban Imaginary in Antonio Capuano’s Sacred Silence’, Studies in European Cinema, 6.1 (2009), 31–45; Alex Marlow-Mann, ‘Subjectivity and the Ethnographic Gaze in Vito e gli altri’, in New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema, ed. by Danielle Hipkins and Roger Pitt (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 267–84; Áine O’Healy, ‘A Neapolitan Childhood: Seduction and Betrayal in Pianese Nunzio 14 anni a maggio’, in Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema, pp. 12–22 (p. 15).

⁴⁸ In his essay dedicated to Vito e gli altri, Marlow-Mann refers to his interview with Capuano (‘Subjectivity and the Ethnographic Gaze’, p. 277) as well as to the conversation Capuano had with Mario Sesti in ‘Tuareg napoletani: intervista a Antonio Capuano’, Cinecritica 14 (September 1991), p. 68.

⁴⁹ R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society, 19.6 (December 2005), 829–59.

⁵⁰ See note 32.

⁵¹ The choice of Daniele’s music to end the movie is evocative of Massimo Troisi’s corpus of work as a director including Ricomincio da tre (1981) and Pensavo fosse amore … invece era un calesse (1991), to which Sorrentino wanted to pay tribute. See Rossella Grasso, ‘“Il mio unico nume tutelare del film è Massimo Troisi”: Paolo Sorrentino alla prima di È stata la mano di Dio’, Il Riformista, 16 Novembre 2021 <https://www.ilriformista.it/il-mio-unico-nume-tutelare-del-film-e-massimo-troisi-paolo-sorrentino-alla-prima-di-e-stata-la-mano-di-dio-261215/> [accessed 18 September 2023].