BREAKING #311

'And everywhere there are relations'

Nicole Ex

Column

April 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

April 2026

Whose are our days? That central question from Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia gains all the more weight in a film steeped in beauty, melancholy, politics, and morality: di chi sono i nostri giorni? It’s a question to note in your logbook, so that you make the right decision when faced with an existential choice.

Making decisions is not what statesman Mariano De Santis, the film’s protagonist, is known for. He has made not choosing his way of life. He postpones, kicks things down the road, so that delay turns into abolition. Will he sign the highly sensitive euthanasia law, just before he – a jurist who still believes in truth – retires?

I saw it announced: La Grazia. Grace, mercy. Yet another word for your logbook – the gift of grace, the answer to mercilessness and the killing blow. We saw the film on Easter Sunday. Know this: I am unconditional when it comes to Sorrentino. I am ready for every film he releases. And he can always count on my grace.

The New Yorker writes exactly why: ‘Few filmmakers embrace beauty as fully as Paolo Sorrentino, a sensuous stylist with a keen sense of the material world and its effects.’ He immerses you in lush classical and modern worlds full of breathtaking estates, landscapes, and decline.

And everywhere there is art. And everywhere there are relationships. Take the one between the statesman and his daughter, who gives her life to support him, until she is on the verge of breaking when he threatens to push signing the law onto his successor: whose are her days, really? If you have one to spare, spend it on Grace.