Music Box Films
Expressing the ideas of the now in the ideas of the past is often a good way to talk about those ideas — racism, homophobia, bigotry, sexism, etc, it’s easy to pretend such things aren’t still all around us, but by showing how things haven’t changed and contextualizing a story in the past allows a bit of a softer touch in teaching audiences a modern lesson. Sometimes that needs to be left up to interpretation, and sometimes ambiguity isn’t so ambiguous at all.
L’immensita comes from Italian director Emanuele Crialese, who co-wrote it with Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni and literally translates to ‘The Immensity’. The immensity in question is the great world in a small world, the world of a young person and their family and loves, and especially their identity, juxtaposed with the same world within a world of their mother and her own perspective.
Penélope Cruz stars as Clara, mother to three children, eldest Adri (Luana Giuliani), and younger Gino, the curious and temperamental (Patrizio Francioni), and Diana (María Chiara Goretti), the littlest peacemaker. Clara is married to Felice (Vincenzo Amato), a man we soon discover is unfaithful and abusive, but only as the children figure this out too, as the main point of view is Adri.
Adri is someone with gender dysphoria in a time even less kind than now, eschewing the birth name of Adriana and preferring to be thought of as a boy, clearly always enjoying when people don’t think of them as a girl. Adri dresses in typically masculine clothing and prefers a boy’s hair style, and Clara is one of the only people (and certainly the only adult) who if not understands, at least supports Adri’s feelings and decisions in this respect.
This underlying tension is what the film is often about, as well as Adri’s back and forth conflict with wanting Clara to have a better life than she seems to be interested in having. We see at times fantasy sequences with classic Italian songs sung by different characters symbolizing their own inner desires and feelings, in contrast sometimes to how the non-fantasy world chooses to perceive them.
Adri also has one of those frantic, light, young love situations with a local Roma girl named Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti), who lives in a very poor sort of not entirely legal shanty town near Adri’s home, but this is a hidden theme that reveals the limits of Adri’s own biases and understandings of how the world works. Still, their relationship is one of light and promise, a buoy against the darkness threatening to drown Adri’s family.
The movie is an intentionally autobiographical one, and allows a personal story to be told in a more universal way about feeling out of place and the deep connections to those that keep you from drowning. Penélope Cruz is always good, here especially in her seamless performance in Italian (not her first in such a role), showing off how to be effortlessly good looking and devastating at the same time.
Luana Giuliani does very well in such a tricky, personal role, in her debut performance — it’s perhaps not quite career making yet for such a smaller scale movie, but it’s got the potential to be something representative of a great actor to come in the future. It’s a very ‘vibes’ sort of movie at times, building a world and tearing it down in pieces, so you have to be in the right state of mind — but if you are, it’s a great example of a foreign film to experience.
L’immensita has a run time of 1 hour 39 minutes, and is not rated.
Music Box Films
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