The winning duo of Paolo Sorrentino
and Toni Servillo is back: the director who won an Oscar in 2014
for La Grande Bellezza will return to direct the actor who
played the film's world-weary Roman journalist protagonist Jep
Gambardella in a new project entitled La Grazia.
The film will be Sorrentino's eleventh and his last since his
latest ode to his native Naples, Parthenope, which topped the
Italian box office this year.
La Grazia, the project of which was previewed by Variety, is the
seventh that sees the 65-year-old Servillo working with the
54-year-old Sorrentino.
Their first collaboration was L'Uomo in Piu' in 2001 in which
the actor played Antonio 'Tony' Pisapia, a Neapolitan pop
singer, famous and charismatic, but also cynical and
self-destructive.
Among his other parts for Sorrentino, in addition to that of
Gambardella, Servillo won plaudits for Le Conseguenze dell'Amore
in 2004, and then in the role of Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo
(2008) and Silvio Berlusconi in Loro in 2018.
Sorrentino, who has also directed episodes of the TV series Il
Giovane Papa and Il Nuovo Papa, was also nominated for an Oscar
in 2022 for E'Stata la Mano di Dio, dedicated to Naples, perhaps
his most personal film that won him the Grand Jury Prize in
Venice.
In that film, Servillo played Saverio Schisa, the father of the
protagonist, Fabietto Schisa, the director's alter ego as a
young man.
Plot details for La Grazia have not been revealed beyond that it
will be a love story set in Italy. Sorrentino will also write
the screenplay, and filming is expected to begin in spring 2025.
La Grazia is a Fremantle film produced by Annamaria Morelli for
The Apartment, a Fremantle company, and Sorrentino's own Numero
10, in association with PiperFilm. The new film will be released
in Italy by PiperFilm.
Parthenope was acquired before its Cannes debut by A24, which
will distribute it in the US starting February 7.
photo: La mano di dio gets best film at David di Donatello
awards in 2022
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