NATIVE NEAPOLITAN GOES BACK TO HIS ROOTS

ITALIAN filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino was raised in an apartment building just a street away from the hospital where he was born 51 years ago, in Vomero, high above Naples, with views of the bay and Mount Vesuvius.

Sorrentino shot much of his new movie, The Hand Of God, in a flat one floor beneath the one he lived in with his parents and two siblings. The original family home wasn’t available, ‘but it has the same architecture and geometry’, the director told me, when we discussed the coming of age story.

Filippo Scotti, left, an extraordinary newcomer, plays a character based on the director at 17. A lot of what happens is invented, but there is truth, too; including a tragedy involving his parents which Sorrentino had been reluctant to address. ‘For many years, all this pain was a long interior monologue with myself,’ he told me. ‘But the act of sharing it has been helpful.’

The Hand Of God’s themes are family, Naples, and cinema itself. ‘Family is the first relationship that you have with the world — you believe that the world is your family,’ he said.

And of the city of his birth, he added: ‘The reason so many people live in Naples, by the sea, is because after a while you can have the feeling you’re living an infinite summer; and that real life never starts.’ And cinema? Sorrentino tells me he can remember watching Marlon Brando break a glass on screen, when he was just a baby. He can’t recall the film, but his older sister told him he asked: ‘Why did the man break the glass?’ The director has made a dozen movies, and watched thousands more; and yet at the back of his mind was always the question: ‘Why did Marlon Brando break that glass?!’

I wonder how many aspiring filmmakers will be as inspired by Sorrentino’s The Hand Of God (yes, the title does refer to that Maradona goal) as he was, by the cinema’s great artists?

The film’s being shown at the BFI London Film Festival today, and the National Film Theatre tonight. It will be shown in cinemas from December 3 and on Netflix from December 15.