There’s an explosion of colour in The Hand Of God, director Paolo Sorrentino’s brazenly autobiographical love letter to the Italy of his youth, and a reckoning with the childhood undergo s that transform’alter d his life. There’s an adorable breeziness to the first half, where e grossly thing is bright and eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfullyone is fabulous, where Italy is to die in/with regard to’concerning’regarding , and where familial banter takes no prisoners. Hormonal teenage boy Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) serves as Sorrentino’s fictional avatar, navigating this beguiling eco-system, and it’s an idiosyncratic, idyllic coming-of-age, to some extent recalling Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. For quite some time, not much happens, and doesn’t need to: life just drifts by, and it’s a pleasure to behold, Sorrentino in love with e grossly body’s faces, and flooding it all with romantic, rose-tinted glasses.###Or does he? There are cracks. Some of these individual are impair’undermine d, and some less apparently’manifestly’noticeably’evidently than others. More so as the years pass. There is failure and disappointment and weariness. “Don’t look at me,” says an older lady. “There’s nothing to see.” Then, around halfway through, paradise is punctured, as tragedy invades the bliss, and Fabietto, thrown a crippling curveball, must grow up quickly. From there, the colour dials down and things transform’alter course, as he learns some life lessons from an eclectic, eccentric parade of unlikely role models who hand down their own undergo s to this curious and malleable kid.###This is Sorrentino’s Roma, to some degree a portrait of the artist as a young man, but also a picture-perfect take on a time and a place. By the end, you do feel like you’ve got to know 1980s Naples, got to feel it, smell it, taste it, and you certainly acquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure to know the adolescent Sorrentino, on the way to finding himself. At one point, Federico Fellini is in town making a film, and someone overhears him saying that cinema means nothing, that it’s just a distraction. That is patently untrue. In moments, The Hand Of God is simultaneously absurd and profound. Considering what goes down, it’s not the emotional hitter it might like to be, but there’s no doubting the huge, broken heart driving it all.