Review: L’immensità
- VENICE 2022: Emanuele Crialese recounts her gender-fluid adolescence in a sophisticated and colourful film, set apart by the starry presence of Penélope Cruz
In a 79th Venice Film Festival blending sexual identity themes by way of movies from various Italian authors (Andrea Pallaoro, Roberta Torre), Emanuele Crialese offers up her own personal representation in L'immensità [+see also:
trailer
interview: Emanuele Crialese
film profile], a movie selected in competition and featuring international star Penélope Cruz.
It’s not only Cruz’s presence which lends an Almodovarian air to the film. There’s also the incredible bond between a mother and her children, the rendering of memories, feelings, impulses and remote emotions in great colour and detail, and the revelation of the toxic masculinity which has infected many European populations over the years.
L’immensità is set half-way through the seventies, in Rome, where whole new districts are springing up and the “economic miracle” is still making its effects felt within society. Adriana (Luana Giuliani) is around 12 years old and belongs to a well-to-do family. She has two smaller brothers, while her mother Clara (Cruz) comes from Franco’s Spain. The latter is a woman with an open mind who can even come across as eccentric to other parents and friends. Her husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato), on the other hand, is a man from the South, of the kind who come home from work expecting to find their dinner on the table. But crucially, the dad doesn’t accept that his oldest daughter Adriana feels like a boy and that she gets people to call her Andrea. The relationship which Adriana and her mother Clara share, however, is symbiotic, highly physical and protective. Her parents’ marriage has clearly reached the end of the line, and when Felice’s secretary turns up at the house to tell Clara she’s pregnant with Felice’s baby, the Spanish mother falls apart. Following a fire apparently caused by Clara’s subsequent absent-mindedness, she decides to check into a clinic to cure her depression as a “betrayed woman”.
Ten years on from Terraferma [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Emanuele Crialese
interview: Emanuele Crialese
film profile], which nabbed the Special Jury Prize in Venice in 2011, Crialese is attempting a qualitative leap with a film proving to be an elegant and colourful vehicle through which to channel biographical emotions, thanks to greater production efforts. It’s further bolstered by sophisticated photography (courtesy of Gergely Poharnok), which extols 1970s interior design, as well as a highly researched film direction approach which sometimes looks to have an impact on the audience and which breaks with the director’s usual work. Crialese’s childhood - which doesn’t seem especially marked by the suffering usually associated with a future sexual transition - is reconstructed (the film’s screenplay is penned by the director alongside Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni, the latter having also co-written Terraferma) through the depiction of minor acts of rebellion against the established order (family, school, church), the turmoil of her first stirrings – pretending to be a boy – courtesy of the teen who lives in the temporary camp for labourers who are working on a building site behind a cane field, and the imaginary of that era, involving songs and TV personalities who represented the average Italian’s idea of the celebrity world. No less than three times, Crialese depicts some form of karaoke in black and white (as was normal for TV at the time) where the young protagonist watches her mother impersonate a famous showgirl like Raffaella Carrà or the singer Patti Pravo, or even herself singing the heart-breaking theme tune from Love Story in Johnny Dorelli’s male voice. We don’t know what will happen afterwards, whether this girl will have an easy life as she transitions into a boy. It almost feels as if all of the pain in this film is reserved for the mother character, a victim of sexist hypocrisy, while the young protagonist who feels like an alien gets to enjoy the usual carefreeness of a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, Penélope Cruz - a real draw for the wider public - adds yet another movingly tragic character to her repertoire.
L’immensità is an Italian-French production by Wildside (a Fremantle Group company), Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia, Chapter 2, Pathé and France 3 Cinéma. International sales are managed by Pathé.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 04/09/2022: Venice 2022 - L'immensità
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© 2022 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso
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