In grazia di Dio - Movie Review

Edoardo Winspeare's way of making films continues to be exceptional today, both because it is an exception and because it is prodigious and spectacular. For my personal preference for the winspearian style and artistic imprint, whenever I have the opportunity, I am very happy to talk about your films. The only difficulty lies in being able to tell the beauty of their simplicity. I realize that this statement of mine has something paradoxical, but on the other hand, the cinema of the Salento director, like the olive trees with twisted trunks of his land, has its roots in the greatest contradictions of humanity. The genuineness of Winspeare's stories is the result of the director's "innocent" way of looking at reality through the camera.

An innocence that does not mean immature and immaturity, but rather the exact opposite: ease, ease and spontaneity. An attitude that is a logical consequence of the safety and naturalness of the director who chooses to tell only stories of which he knows he has total and complete knowledge. Stories close and small, so particular as to become a symbolic detail of the great ones, reductions in scale of an ocean of humanity. The ease with which Winspeare seems to have 'the solution in his pocket' to gigantic problems in which it is difficult to find the edge of the skein is unsettling and disarming. Downsizing and coherence, these are the keywords he seems to want to suggest to the viewer and which he first keeps faith with his productive and authorial choices. Downsizing and coherence, two terms that refer to an attitude respectful of one's nature and the correctness of the necessary and indispensable choices.

The story of a family of fasonists (made up of four women and as many generations), who returns to the countryside to cultivate the land because forced by the crisis to close their factory, does not hide any romantic or radical chic directorial approach. It is the story of a return not out of nostalgia but out of anger. Anger at letting himself be corrupted by the dynamics of a trade that sees the only means of exchange in money and that has made man a means and not an end, to put it in the words of Moravia. Here the barter, initially identified by necessity as the only possible but temporary solution, ends up becoming the only acceptable and definitive one. In this way, more space remains for the search for love, for man and for his personal construction of happiness starting from his own means and possibilities.

To be satisfied, to be 'in the grace of God', to make happiness enough, is not the consequence of a compromise here, but only the first small step possible towards a greater serenity of soul that will be beyond to come. And this small step requires faith and trust. Relying on, letting go, losing your balance to find another one. Prefer a life of hope to desperate life. Believing that life will be able to rekindle in a dark reality to allow man to survive and live despite. On the other hand, life, as a woman, like a phoenix rising from itself, is capable of self-generation and regeneration. This jewel of lights, colors and images created out of the Roman-centric dynamics of the film industry and 'produced' mostly through the exchange of goods and goods, is proof of the extreme coherence of Edoardo Winspeare which he solves with the simplicity of bartering in the lands of border, the production difficulties of the planet 'cinema' in the capital, thus giving concreteness to the resolutive hypothesis that the film proposes. Winspeare experiments, verifies and demonstrates that there is a way out and shows it to us, making an act of faith scientifically demonstrable. And to me the words of Matthew's Gospel come to mind “Do not therefore worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will already have its concerns.

His pain is enough for each day ”, because rather than worrying about the impending greatness of a heavy and dark future, it pays much more to deal with small things, day by day, time by time, here and now, because the future is always' under construction ', the present is the only real and possible time. Time to live. In the grace of God it constitutes the ideal and real summa of the Winspearian production so far made. Non-professional actors and dialect to tell the truth; the landscape is the undisputed interpreter and protagonist who supports the actors 'on an equal footing'; the light, the unmistakable light of the earth at the edge of the seas and the harsh and cutting wind of change that corrodes the earth and its women making them stronger; the dimension of the sacred as interference by the divine in human daily life, an essential reference like a votive shrine at a crossroads for a wandering traveler.