Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, John Malkovich, Oscar Isaac, and Gal Gadot hunt for the original manuscript of the Divine Comedy'

"Dante Alighieri's journey to hell in the Divine Comedy ends when he finally sees the stars again. A few of them also appear in Julian Schnabel's latest film. And, in a way, they helped the director leave his own abyss behind. Herein is the film's most involuntary homage to the Italian poet, the nerve center of the project, titled In the Hand of Dante. The feature spent years buried under all sorts of unforeseen events and could well have remained forever in some demonic circle."

"The latter offered him a string of books to buy the rights to, so he could choose and adapt one. I chose the most impossible, the filmmaker told the press in Venice. That is, In the Hand of Dante by Nick Tosches. The peculiar writer, who specialized in biographies and died in 2019, invented in the novel his own search for the original manuscript of Alighieri's Commedia and the means to authenticate it. In reality, this precious document doesn't exist. Or hasn't yet been found."

Julian Schnabel's film In the Hand of Dante premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival after spending roughly two decades in limbo. The film features numerous stars including Oscar Isaac, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Gal Gadot, Martin Scorsese, Jason Momoa, and Gerard Butler. The project adapts Nick Tosches's novel about an invented search for an original manuscript of Dante Alighieri's Commedia allegedly found in a Vatican box. The fictional search entangles the protagonist with swindlers, hitmen, and mobsters, and also leads to a love story that echoes Dante's verse about love moving the sun and other stars.

Read at english.elpais.com