The Permission to Breathe: Sealed Lives in Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Clinical Practice

Why do some people choose to live in a prison built of rituals and silences, rather than risk the unpredictability of an encounter? This is the question that runs through the work of Paolo Sorrentino, beginning with The Consequences of Love (2004), continuing with The Family Friend (2006), and resurfacing in his latest film, La Grazia (2025).

The protagonist describes himself as “the most boring subject in existence,” yet his sealed life holds us captive. He is a character we analysts know well: the man who lives in a state of self-imposed isolation, protected by a rigid routine that serves as armor. But what is he really protecting himself from? Is it the so-called “fear of intimacy”, a more general fear of losing control, or is there more?

The “Sealed” Man and His Prison

These protagonists are variations on the same obsessive discourse: men who have made hiding a survival strategy, each in his own way.

Titta Di Girolamo (The Consequences of Love) lives in a Swiss hotel, a prisoner of bureaucratic punctuality and silence. He hides to escape the law and vengeance; for him, invisibility is the only guarantee of staying alive. Geremia de’ Geremei (The Family Friend) is a usurer who hides instead behind the screen of his cynicism and moral squalor; he retreats into the grotesque so as never to have to face the emptiness of his loneliness or the weight of rejection.

Mariano De Santis (La Grazia) is the President of the Republic, nicknamed “reinforced concrete.” A man of law, a former professor of jurisprudence, rigid, living in the Quirinale Palace as though in a mausoleum. He hides no crime; rather, he seeks to protect his own moral integrity. Mariano does not make decisions because deciding means exposing himself — dirtying himself with reality, revealing himself as partial, and above all, subjecting himself to judgment: that of others and his own.

As long as he remains motionless behind protocol, he can delude himself into believing he coincides with the purity of his ideals; but were he to choose, he would reveal something of himself: his tastes, his inclinations, his personal imprint. He would discover, in short, that he is not an infallible institution, but a subject with his own history and his own desires.

Unable to accept this “stain” of subjectivity — which would make him human and therefore open to judgment — he finds himself paralyzed, incapable of making any decision. This rigidity is mirrored in his private drama: his inability to forgive his wife, who passed away eight years ago, and who had betrayed him forty years before. In a moment of painful lucidity, he himself asks why he is still stuck there, and why, from the moment of that discovery, he has never moved on.

Was his wife guilty of having desired? Or was her real transgression bringing desire too close to him, threatening the stability of his sealed world?

This is the very essence of enclosure: a web that ends up suffocating even those nearby. It is no coincidence that, in a pivotal moment of the film, a prisoner awaiting a pardon (grazia) says to her daughter: “You are not breathing.” It is the definitive diagnosis of a sealed life: where there is no exposure, there can be no breath. The price of safety is, in the end, asphyxiation.

Rituals as Anesthetics

Whether it is a Swiss hotel, the dusty house of a usurer, or the halls of the Quirinale, the setting is always a cage. These men count: they count money, they count days, they count protocols. Their posture is rigid, their gaze turned elsewhere. They live in a “simulation” of life in order to avoid confronting its unpredictability, its losses, its pain.

Sorrentino’s protagonists inhabit their self-imposed isolation through iron-clad rituals that function as existential anesthetics: while Titta Di Girolamo punctuates his solitude with his Wednesday-morning heroin, Geremia de’ Geremei numbs his emotional emptiness through the obsessive accumulation of money and food, and President Mariano De Santis allows himself the ritual of forbidden cigarettes. These methodical, secret gestures are necessary “prostheses” for bearing the weight of a sealed life — until the irruption of desire or doubt dismantles the routine, forcing the man to finally step outside his ivory tower. Not all of Sorrentino’s characters — and not all patients — manage to do so.

When Life Comes Knocking

The engine of Sorrentino’s storytelling, like that of an analysis, is the irruption of the unexpected. A crack opens in the reinforced concrete. In the first two films it is falling in love with a woman; in La Grazia, it is the beauty of doubt and a question: “Who owns our days?” Suddenly, a breath of life disrupts the routine and forces the protagonist to call into question an entire existence devoted to “facts” and the law.

In clinical practice, we often encounter regimented, serious patients whose daily lives resemble an arranged marriage with duty. These are lives marked by a profound emotional isolation, lived by proxy, in which the subject inhabits his own time like a stranger in a rented room. They are people who feel constantly watched and judged, driven by an omnipresent Superego that imposes a rigid code: every gesture is filtered through the paralyzing doubt of what is “right” or “wrong.”

I think of a professional who spent decades following the tracks laid down by family and social expectations; for him, life was not a calling but a protocol to be observed, a flawless performance of scores written by others. In such existences, the vital impulse is sacrificed on the altar of consistency and morality, until the weight of having to be “irreproachable” becomes an unbearable asphyxiation.

His personal “grace” came through the simultaneous loss of his familial and professional roles: a son leaving home and the end of a secure job that he had until then experienced as a necessary imprisonment. This collapse stripped away every alibi of “duty,” hurling him into a void where the coordinates of an entire life suddenly vanished. In that forced silence, he was finally compelled to confront himself, moving from the reassuring “what must I do?” to the unsettling “what do I want?” The sudden infatuation with a stranger was not the catalyst for change, but its consequence: a space had finally been created, an opening that allowed him to look his own desire in the face.

Life as Simulation and the Fear of the “Cure”

Then there are those who cannot leave their ivory tower. In analysis we may encounter young men who seem to have given up on living in the real world in favor of retreating into the virtual one. They dress the same way every day, speak in a literal, almost robotic manner, and treat relationships like missions in a video game.

This is a familiar paradox: when the analysis begins to work, some patients flee. In my professional experience, analysis is rarely interrupted because nothing is happening; it is far more often interrupted because too much is happening. When the mask slips and desire asserts itself, panic sets in. It is the fear of being traversed by life — the same fear Titta experiences when, after years of silence, he decides to sit at the bar counter and look the bartender (Sofia) in the eyes.

In that moment, the millimetric precision of his routine falters: he understands that desire is an irruption that cannot be administered. Titta says it plainly: “Perhaps sitting down at this counter is the most dangerous thing I have done in my entire life.” For those who have lived sealed away, the vitality that returns is not simply an immediate liberation, but a threat that makes it impossible to go back to living as automatons.

The Time of the Fruit

Change in analysis is not an event to be forced, but a process to be cultivated. It is like a fruit still attached to the tree: we must not tear it off, but wait until it is ready. As analysts, we work to create the conditions for transformation: we sow questions where there were only granite certainties, we help patients tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing, and we offer new words to name what stirs just beneath the surface — without anticipating too much or wishing to impose our own direction.

We do not force the fruit to fall, but nourish the roots so that ripening becomes possible and the tree has the strength to let it go. It is this groundwork that allows, in time, that shift in discourse which is the true sign of deep transformation.

Because “grace,” in the end, is precisely this: granting oneself grace. Giving oneself, at last, permission to err, to be different from one’s ideals, and to be seen — surrendering the need to control what the other sees. Only then does the fruit fall, the armor crumble, and one begin, finally, to breathe again.