We should not be surprised if a director who in his very short speech of thanks for the Oscar, in 2014 for The great beauty, cited Diego Armando Maradona as a source of inspiration and that in each of his films he put a football quote, today summarizes the path of his life in It was the hand of God (in cinemas from November 24th and on Netflix from December 15th), biography in images of a boy who grew up in Naples with the myth of the Pibe de Oro, that Pibe who, unwittingly, saved the life of Paolo Sorrentino.
Like the same Sorrentino he said, in fact, he was sixteen when his parents died in their sleep poisoned by the release of carbon monoxide, in the holiday home in Roccaraso. The director had been allowed, after much insistence, to stay in Naples, to be able to follow a trip to Empoli with his favorite team. It was the hand of God, then: so whispers to him a character from the film, the hand of Dios, the same with which Maradona scored the most rogue of goals, to England in the 1986 World Cup.
In all of his films, Sorrentino sowed some of his passion for football. Starting with the first, The extra man, which refers to the story of Agostino Di Bartolomei (the captain of Rome who committed suicide in the mid-90s), with the protagonist, a pure man with a rigid personal morality, Antonio Pisapia, who finds himself having to deal with a world polluted by betting and scams by teammates. Memorable the character del Molosso (inspired by Petisso Pesaola, Napoli coach in the 70s) with his famous outburst in the locker room, at the interval of a match.
He is a Napoli fan – and it could not be otherwise – also the Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando) in the TV series The Young Pope, so faithful to the secular religion of football as to preserve the image of the Argentine bomber Gonzalo Higuain on the cover of his smartphone. Even ne The great beauty football is evoked by the Gazzetta dello Sport that a lady is reading, you are told of an injured Totti, sitting on a bench next to the bust of the general of the Risorgimento Giuseppe Avezzana. A short sequence, yet another tribute to the passion of a lifetime.
It is still Maradona – fat, evicted, torn from life, with respiratory problems – who in a luxurious nursing home in Switzerland floats pompously in an imaginative elsewhere, the protagonist of one of the most beautiful sequences of Youth: Diego dribbling with a tennis ball, Diego indulging in nostalgia, Diego returning to see himself, deployed in midfield before the start of a game while filling his waiting with small and definitive dance steps. “Maradona in Naples came out of a cave, that of San Paolo: he appeared, died, rose and became a martyr, he has much in common with mystical figures”. For Sorrentino, football is magic, nostalgia, illusion, a return to a place where we had a good time: childhood.
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