Loving the films of the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino, I thought he’d be easy to chat to. But a maestro is a maestro, as I was reminded when I interviewed him in London last week. Masked and communicating through a translator, I semaphored my admiration for his new film The Hand of God, starting with its spectacular opening shot. Like a bird, the camera flies over the sea, then focuses on a vintage car tooling along the promenade, before panning over the city again. But he rejected my praise: ‘It’s not complicated. It’s a normal shot by helicopter.’
He’s right, of course, that his new classic coming-of-age story represents a departure towards simplicity. Gone is the virtuoso editing of his 2008 political movie Il Divo, gone the baroque of The Great Beauty, his Oscar-winning 2013 ode to Rome, which conjured a giraffe in the Baths of Caracalla and a disco bacchanal overlooking the Colosseum.
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