With only a few months left of his term in the Quirinale, the widowed President of Italy is contemplating his future whilst having to consider a few difficult decisions that may end up defining not just his presidency but his legacy, too. “De Santis” (Toni Servillo) is tasked with signing into law a contentious bill on euthanasia but will his own conscious allow him! Will his close friendship with the Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin)? He must also consider two pardons before him. Both are legitimate convictions for murder but both could have mitigating circumstances - if he felt convinced enough - but what emerges quite swiftly about this man is that he is a natural born prevaricator. An experienced jurist by profession, he duly delegates much of the work with his latter pair of tasks to his lawyer daughter “Dorotea” (Anna Ferzetti) whilst he contemplates the aspirations of his life-long friend “Ugo” (Massimo Venturiello) to succeed him in office. It’s these aspirations that are proving the greatest source of conflict for this man, as he believes that his late wife had an affair some forty years earlier, and that “Ugo” was the partner. His best friend through all of this, the feisty “Coco” (Milvia Marigliano) thinks he is wrong, but steadfastly refuses to reveal the identity of the man and so the scene is now set for this president to have to find some courage - one way or the other. Servillo plays the role very much in a style of less being more, and given there isn’t really so much by way of excess chatter here, that works effectively. Ferzetti also delivers well as the distracted President leaves his daughter to do his heavy lifting and thereby uses her character to present us with an insight into just what we might consider mitigating circumstances as two plausibly distinct situations are evaluated, without any clear parameters for us to make any judgements. The production design works wonders at setting an almost sterile environment for this man to work. So often he is portrayed as a lonely and isolated figure, and again even the long and deliberate puffs on his cigarettes bring added depths to a characterisation that is almost counterintuitively aloof yet still human(e). The threads knit nicely, if not necessarily completely, as the film steadily progresses and by the end we see a man faced with an uncertainty that might just be laced with opportunity. This is a stylishly produced drama that takes so much of the hype out of politics and shows us a man of principle and flaws, and it’s an easy couple of hours of occasionally thought-provoking cinema to watch.