“Who owns our time?” is not merely a question posed to the protagonist of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia; it is also the film’s provocation. In a political landscape shaped by endurance rather than rupture, Sorrentino turns his gaze to Mariano De Santis, President of Italy, a man who has survived power by mastering restraint. Played with calibrated gravity by Toni Servillo, Mariano governs not through action but through delay, inhabiting a presidency defined less by decisions than by the careful avoidance of them.
For a premier who has withstood a long presidential tenure, and given the political history of Italy, the script remains overly cautious. In the final six months of his presidency, Mariano-the most powerful man in the country-listens to the echoes of loneliness within the presidential house and, albeit inhibited, listens to rap as well. A jurist before his election, Mariano takes pride in his profession and is almost smug about his 2,000-odd-page criminal law manuals, which colleagues describe as “unscalable.”
An astute politician, he has always played it safe, earning the nickname “Reinforced Concrete,” a title everyone knows except him. Once he learns of it, he seems bothered enough to question everyone, despite knowing precisely why it fits. Yet the ghost on his shoulder is not criticism from his daughter, his colleagues, or his friend, but that of his wife.
Love drives his world-or, more precisely, the inability to accept that someone once loved could be “unfaithful”. Forty years on, lodged like a fishbone, Mariano’s thoughts and epiphanies circle the same questions: why, and more importantly, who. He persistently seeks answers from his closest friend, Coco, who teases him freely while refusing to reveal the identity of his wife’s one time lover.
Coco Valleri, played by Milvia Marigliano, is a tour de force, carrying much of the film’s humour while standing nose to nose with her old classmate-now President-and repeatedly dictating his boundaries, often telling him simply to “get off my fucking back.” Her character adopts an almost paternal tone toward Mariano, nudging him to move on, a posture fully clarified in the penultimate scene, which may or may not resolve the protagonist’s central question.
Momentum arrives through Mariano’s daughter and chief advisor, Dorotea, whose interventions strike directly at his conscience. She brings with her a barrage of tests for this long-serving president: a bill to approve euthanasia, and the potential pardon of two individuals-one who killed his wife, and another who killed her husband. Here, the question resurfaces: “Who owns our time?” Afflicted yet unmoved, Mariano retreats into familiar political dormancy, insisting that “bureaucracy is meant to be slow, to give people time to reflect.”
Amidst all this, Mariano develops a keen interest in an astronaut sent into space, and on one such occasion reaches a point of crisis, left dumbfounded by what he witnesses. As in much of Sorrentino’s work, faith folds back into the character’s arc. Mariano enters the sacrosanct alongside his friend, the Pope, seeking proximity-if not closure-across these various fronts before vacating the chair.
Sorrentino ties the threads together in the final scene, landing the film as cautiously as it began. True to his protagonist, he toys with questions and emotions in a restrained, humorous register that ultimately “cements” just how much more the film might have been.
