Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo) is a man of law who serves as the President of the Republic in an imaginary yet distinctly recognizable Italy. As the last six months of his mandate begin, before reaching the end of his seven-year term he must still untie several knots: on one side, he has to decide whether to grant clemency to two people who committed murder under arguably mitigating circumstances; on the other, a bill on euthanasia has been sitting on his desk for months, waiting for a signature he keeps postponing.Two people support him in the demanding solitude of his office: his daughter Dorotea, a brilliant legal scholar and his most trusted adviser, and Coco Valori, an old friend, a sharp-tongued and audacious art critic. Where lies the boundary between the legal instrument and the individual decision, between a sentence that has become final and the grounds for mercy, and therefore between the acquisition of evidence and the unfathomable truth revealed in a glance? These are exquisitely fragile questions, where law, morality, religion, and personal conviction intertwine. But above all — what is grace? “Doubt is grace, decision is courage”.A subtle and powerful film, superbly performed by a stratospheric Toni Servillo, who gives body and soul to a man that seems to have lost both, trapped in the regrets of a life never fully lived. In La Grazia Sorrentino’s cinema pauses and breathes, yet there is never a moment of respite. The form — always the hallmark of his work — embraces the pure pleasure of storytelling. It is at once a private drama, an absurd comedy, and a sentimental film featuring a presidential guardsman who could have stepped out of an Old-Hollywood farce. An ode to the human condition: joyful and sorrowful, comic and melancholic.A film touched by grace.Teresa Cavina