Critic's Notebook

Andrea Pirrello

Paolo Sorrentino’s latest and this year’s Venice International Film Festival opener, “La grazia,” is the antithesis of “Il divo” and “Loro,” his previous features centering on political leaders, despite it also starring his go-to leading man, Toni Servillo, who played Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi, respectively, in the previous films.

“La grazia” opens with a passage from the Italian constitution outlining the presidential duties, superimposing an airshow in which afterburns from fighter jets emit smoke patterned after the Italian flag. Mr. Servillo’s fictional President Mariano De Santis takes these obligations quite seriously – the opposite of former Prime Ministers Andreotti and Berlusconi – earning himself the nickname “Reinforcement Concrete.”

Most of his daily routines are so unremarkably ceremonial that Mr. Sorrentino quite literally blends one scene with the next, presenting it all as a blur. With only six months left in President De Santis’s term, the last key items on the agenda are signing into law a bill on euthanasia and granting clemencies. He beats around the bush on the former, requesting many redrafts, with the full intention of leaving it to his successor. Meanwhile, he delegates to his daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), the tedious task of reviewing the pardon petitions.

President De Santis is mostly preoccupied with his 8-years-deceased wife, Aurora, and her extramarital affair four decades ago. He remembers her in these dreamy, foggy snippets, a highly picturesque imagining of a reality the film will contrast much later. He continues to interrogate his old friends Ugo (Massimo Venturiello) and Coco (Milvia Marigliano) about the identity of her lover.

Naturally, mortality is also on his mind. While the frail president of Portugal staggers out of a limo, President De Santis turns and asks, “Do I look that old?” His steady diet of quinoa and limit of one cigarette per day, as mandated by Dorotea for health reasons, kind of kill all the joy for him. Fortunately, he often carries on hilarious banter with Coco, a cynical art critic reminiscent of those colorful characters in “The Great Beauty.”

As we’ve come to expect from Mr. Sorrentino, the film is absolutely gorgeous. It is full of these stately, beautifully lit palatial spaces impeccably photographed by Daria D’Antonio, who also lensed “The Hand of God” and “Parthenope.” The various doorways align like a tunnel. We never get a sense of the lay of the land in this massive space.

Mr. Sorrentino’s long, wide master shots often find President De Santis all alone, sitting on a settee by himself. His loneliness is well established visually before he finally laments it to the Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin), who seizes the opportunity to push the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on euthanasia.

Unlike Mr. Sorrentino’s more recent outings, the film isn’t shrouded in mysticism and surrealism. For example, scenes in a prison are shot matter-of-factly, almost Dardennes like.

There are these electronic dance musical ques constantly interrupting the rituals. Sometimes the E.D.M. interludes become extended, as if revealing undercurrents beneath the rigidity of a life of law and discipline. This culminates in President De Santis discovering rapper Guè Pequeno’s 2015 song “Le bimbe piangono” and Mr. Servillo spitting fire.

What is the point of all this? The title, Italian for grace, says it all. The Pope advises President De Santis to seek grace. To which he responds, “What is that?” Over the course of the film, he does find out. And because of that, he is finally able to move on from his past, make decisions without needing to know all the facts and imagine himself as an astronaut floating without gravity.