when justice becomes human

We just saw the preview of Grace Of Paolo Sorrentino, which will be released in theaters on January 15th. But before the preview, we saw grace: real grace. Granted by the Head of State, Sergio Mattarellathe day before Christmas. Among the five cases, two overlap perfectly with Sorrentino’s screenplay.

The extreme and silent gesture

Reversing the famous incipit ofAnna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, even the unhappy people can all be alike. AND article 87, paragraph 11 of the Constitution to found this extreme and silent gesture: pardon as a personal act of the President of the Republic, exercised after investigation and with the advice of the Minister of Justice. Not an emotional shortcut, but a valve of humanity foreseen by the law. And it is within this constitutional perimeter that the five pardoned profiles are placed, each bearing a fracture between legal punishment and moral guilt.

Cases of grace

The first is Bardhyl Zeneli (1962), convicted of escaping from house arrest: an expulsion from the home which, according to the supervisory magistrate and Attorney General, did not constitute a crime. Grace extinguishes the entire punishment, healing a technical gap rather than a human one. Then there is Franco Cioni (1948), convicted of the voluntary murder of his terminally ill wife, with whom he had shared fifty years of life. Here grace becomes a very difficult word: it extinguishes the residual sentence by taking together the forgiveness of the family, the health conditions of the condemned person and the drama of the context. It is the case that most dialogues with Sorrentino’s cinema and with his questioning of the boundary between pity, guilt and responsibility. Alessandro Ciappei (1974) instead represents the dimension of time: a scam from 2014, of modest severity, a life rebuilt abroad. Grace intervenes on the residual sentence as a recognition of a completed path, not as a removal of the past. The story is still different Gabriele Spezzuti (1968): drug crimes in 2005, prison sentence already served, a very heavy fine remains. Presidential clemency cancels the residual part of the financial penalty, taking into account the living conditions and the absence of recidivism. Here too, the Constitution operates as a rebalancing instrument. In the end Abdelkarim Alla F. Hamad (1995), sentenced to thirty years for complicity in multiple murders and violation of immigration regulations.

From Mattarella’s grace to Sorrentino’s film

The pardon is partial, measured, motivated by ten years of detention, by his young age at the time of the events, by a path of recovery recognized in prison. It’s at this point that the film comes knocking again. Even the profiles he talks about Grace they are terminally ill physically or mentally. And Sorrentino tells us, rightly, that violent husbands are of the latter kind. The story of Grace seen at the cinema it is all human, rather than political. But it wears the institutional grisaille to contain the spirals that burn down in the bowels and accompany them like lost souls towards heaven. The Quirinal grace is there, the tickle of history too. Sorrentino’s protagonist, not surprisingly, is called Mariano De Santislike that Mariano Rumor who was the architect of half a dozen governments made and broken. The President’s daughter, the actress Anna Ferzettiis called Dorotea, like the Christian Democrat current that saw in addition to Rumor, Emilio Colombo, Aldo Moro e Paolo Emilio Taviani. The President, unbeknownst to him, has a nickname: Reinforced Concrete. He is a widower, unburdened and hurt by his omnipresent daughter. A declared echo of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the jurist who became a magistrate and then rose to the Colle. The key to some mysteries lies in the character of Dora Valori. The surname is not accidental.

La Grazia, Sorrentino questions consciences and plucks the strings of ethics

We cannot ignore the emotional and, at the same time, political capacity of the film. Question consciences, pluck the strings of ethics without overdoing it, stamp the pages of the news without hesitation, caress now Dostoevsky, no Pavese. It takes us from the Quirinale to Piedmont, from the palaces of power to the prisons, inside the corridors, the parlors, the long waits of those who live a life in suspense. Right, wrong. True, false. The great dilemmas that suspend us as in the decision to sign or not a law, that on euthanasia, which holds thousands of suffered lives in the balance. The film of Sorrentino allows us to visit, as he did Marco Pannella every Christmas, the universe of prisons and justice that doesn’t work. He does it in the best period: with the holidays, families reunited, the discussions on the referendum that will be voted on in the spring. There too everyone will have to decide. The President’s decisions Mariano De Santis they are meditated, suffered, and finally supported. As we hope those of the Italians will be.

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Aldo Torchiaro