God Willing

An Italian comedy set in Rome. Tommaso is a well-known heart surgeon. A good doctor and an unbearable man. He is an atheist. He believes in his own intelligence and respects nobody else. One evening the family gathers. His son Andrea has something to say. Tommaso thinks he knows what. The boy will say he is gay and the man is prepared for it. Andrea says something else. He is leaving medicine to become a priest. Tommaso is levelled. He looks for a reason. There must be a person; someone who confused the boy. That person is Don Pietro. Charismatic, tattooed, a priest with a criminal record. From there the film is a story of surveillance. Tommaso starts following him. He wants to find the priest's business. A fraud, money, an affair; there must be something. He finds nothing. Instead he starts working as a carpenter on the church roof. He goes in disguise and gets close to the man. What the narrative is interested in is not religion but arrogance: its idea is that the man's real problem is not belief but his inability to count anyone but himself as right, and that the priest shows him this without arguing at all. The family line opens too. His wife has not spoken for years, his daughter is unhappy, his son-in-law is out of work; Tommaso has noticed none of it. The priest's past opens at the end and the narrative gives him a fault as well. The ending is emotional but offers no easy conversion. This is Edoardo Falcone's first film and it won best first film at the David di Donatello awards in Italy. Marco Giallini, Alessandro Gassmann, Laura Morante and Ilaria Spada are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Italian comedy and narratives built on a character's change. Who it is not for: anyone expecting sharp satire; the narrative settles somewhere mild and genuinely takes on no one.