Dio ride

 Laughter must respond to certain demands of life in common. Laughter must have a social meaning.
Henri Bergson 

We enter Dio ride (God Laughs), directed by Giovanni Veronesi, with a certain scepticism, perhaps even intending to smile at its protagonist and distance ourselves from a religious tale that risks seeming naïve. Then, almost without our noticing, the film takes that position away from us: it draws us in and leads us into more unsettling territory, where faith ceases to be a matter of doctrine and becomes an inner, political and existential conflict. For the issue is not simply whether to believe in God, but who has the right to speak about Him, interpret Him and, above all, decide what constitutes a legitimate way of doing so. 

Fra Leopoldo does not preach in the institutional sense of the word: he tells stories. He can neither read nor write, yet he possesses a gift for communication that eludes the guardians of the official word. In his tales, Scripture loses the rigidity of sacred text and recovers something of its original narrative power: the Gospels become stories to listen to, understand and even laugh at. His faith is no less profound for being less solemn; it is a faith that needs no intimidation to be credible. And it is precisely this simplicity that constitutes his heresy. 

From Dio ride to Fuori, confinement reveals the face of a society that confuses punishment with care and deviance with a sin to be atoned for. In Veronesi’s film, a woman is locked away because she is deemed a sinner and is even deprived of her bond with her son; in Martone’s Fuori, prison becomes a paradoxical space in which relationships and forms of solidarity denied by the outside world can emerge. In both films, the recognition of the other begins when the judgement that has turned them into a case to be corrected, a body to be contained, an existence to be managed, is suspended. The scene in which the woman laughs after Leopoldo has washed her is its most devastating expression: before freedom itself, what is restored to her is the possibility of becoming a person again, culminating in an unpredictable and shocking gesture. It is a scene that sends shivers down the spine: it is as though something inside her had given way, only to come back to life and react to the world. The scene shows what can happen when a human being who has long been treated like an animal is finally recognised. It also exposes a society that turns difference, presumed madness and sin into sufficient grounds for depriving someone of their freedom. 

The film thus identifies a contradiction that runs throughout the history of religious institutions: when the defence of God becomes primarily the defence of the power exercised in His name, faith risks turning into its opposite. One does not need to deny God to challenge the Church; sometimes it is enough to give Him back to the people, taking Him away from those who claim the exclusive right to administer His word. 

The explicit reference to Galileo Galilei, from this perspective, takes on a meaning that goes beyond the familiar opposition between science and religion. The telescope becomes an instrument of vision that no longer accepts the limits imposed by what authority declares visible. Heresy lies not only in astronomical discoveries, but also in the act of observing directly, verifying and looking where one is not supposed to look. It is the right to exercise one’s own gaze without first asking permission from those who determine what one is allowed to see. And inevitably, in the background, stands Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori in 1600: the memory of someone who paid with his life for the distance between learned, brilliant thought and orthodoxy. Two different figures, united by their conflict with an authority that does not easily tolerate anything that exceeds the boundaries it has drawn. 

No less significant is Cardinal Maculani’s remark about priests: they are stupid, he says, because they believe only in God or Satan. It is a brutal statement, but precisely for that reason, an illuminating one. Between good and evil lies an immense territory of contradictions, ambiguities, desires, vulnerabilities and doubts that no classification can fully encompass. Reducing human experience to an absolute choice between two alternatives means giving up on understanding it. And a Church incapable of inhabiting this complexity ends up confusing the defence of truth with the repression of everything it cannot interpret. 

It is through Isabella that the religious discourse acquires an even more radical concreteness. The countess is not merely an unhappy woman seeking consolation: she is a woman whose husband has turned her body into an instrument of reproduction. Marital sexuality, stripped of desire and consent, becomes a form of violence legitimised by marriage and the social order. Her husband wants an heir; the woman expected to bear him seems of little interest to him. Isabella, by contrast, wants to bring a child into the world who will not have to grow up within the same logic of domination. 

In Leopoldo’s stories, Isabella encounters something she has found neither in her marriage nor in aristocratic society: the possibility of thinking differently. It is not sermons that set her free, but a voice capable of reaching her without judging her. Here, faith does not prescribe obedience; it opens up a mental space from which a concrete escape may become possible. The countess, seemingly fragile, discovers that freedom begins when we stop regarding what is imposed upon us as natural. 

This is one of the film’s most interesting passages, although Isabella’s character perhaps deserved greater development. Her story shows that power is exercised not only in the courts of the Inquisition or the papal palaces, but also within the home, through institutions that turn subordination into duty and violence into a right. The same logic that seeks to determine which version of God may legitimately be told also seeks to dictate what kind of life a woman must accept. 

The title, Dio ride, thus contains the key to the entire film. We are accustomed to imagining a God who watches, judges and keeps account of our sins; a supreme authority before whom every action must be justified. Veronesi suggests a different possibility: a God capable of laughing, not necessarily at human beings, but alongside them, perhaps even at their claims to absoluteness. A God who does not feel threatened by laughter because He has no need to defend His own authority. The real threat is to those who have built their power on solemnity, fear and guilt. 

Leopoldo’s laughter is not an escape from the depth of faith. It is the way faith becomes human again, frees itself from its sacred pose and accepts the contradictions of existence. Laughter relativises hierarchies, undermines certainties and restores to people the right not to be merely sinners standing before an invisible judge. Above all, it reminds us that the sacred does not necessarily coincide with solemnity: it can also manifest itself in joy, in the unexpected and in the ability not to take ourselves terribly seriously all the time. 

The merit of Dio ride lies in bringing us, through an accessible narrative and compelling performances, to a question that concerns far more than the seventeenth century. Institutions change, but the temptation to repress what cannot be controlled remains. So does the difficulty of distinguishing loyalty to a principle from loyalty to those who claim to own it. 

In the end, the question is not whether one can laugh at God, but why anyone should need to prevent it. If God is truly omnipotent, what could He possibly fear? Perhaps laughter is heretical only to those who have confused the divine with their own power. And perhaps that God who laughs, watching us struggle to separate good from evil, the righteous from heretics, the pure from the impure, is laughing precisely at our stubborn insistence on simplifying what we cannot understand. 

A God who laughs does not absolve everything: He simply has no need to condemn everything in order to exist. 

Humour is the last stage of existential awareness before faith.
Søren Kierkegaard