More Than a Pardon. More Than More
Man is born free (J.-J. Rousseau), but is he free if he loves? Love is sanctity, but is it not also an unfree, irrevocable attachment? If you are deeply in love with another person, do you have the freedom not to love them?
A free person bears responsibility before the law precisely because they are free. Freedom is the presumption for the existence of laws through personal reason and personal responsibility. If, for example, a person commits murder, they go to prison because they had the freedom to choose between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil — the murder was committed following a free choice, and they bear the consequences. This person would not go to prison if they were presumed to be unfree; if one is unfree, it means another (or something else) directs them, and they bear no responsibility for their actions.
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But what do we do with a person who is madly in love? Is such a person free enough to bear responsibility before the law? By loving another, they become part of them; their personalities overlap. Do they have the freedom to escape from themselves? No, of course not — no one is capable of escaping themselves. Can we then consider that they freely chose the crime if they kill out of love and due to the impossibility of escape (from themselves and the other)? Are they guilty if love and impossibility render them unfree?
This immense question is posed within the span of three seconds in Paolo Sorrentino’s film La Grazia (The Pardon/Grace) — alongside many other great questions, equally unobtrusively. If you love art, there is nothing else to do but watch the film.
The President of Italy, Mariano De Santis — a top jurist and a universally recognized polymath of the most precise law — makes a decision in favor of “unfreedom” in the case of love: he pardons a woman abused by her husband. She does not regret killing him. She did not act in self-defense. She simply loved him and could not escape.
Only the brilliant performance of Toni Servillo as President De Santis distracts from these grand questions with the dilemma: is he the great master, or is it Sorrentino for choosing him?
Incidentally, the top jurist Mariano De Santis knows that even the most impeccable law is no guarantee of reaching the truth. La Grazia is more than a pardon. More than more.
