It’s tempting to compare Emanuele Crialese, the award-winning director of Terraferma and Respiro, with Donna Tartt, the famously infrequent author whose three celebrated novels (written in longhand) have each been published a decade apart.
L’Immensità, co-written by Francesca Manieri, Vittorio Moroni and the director, is Crialese’s first film in 11 years, and it’s as considered and heartfelt as that hiatus suggests. An autobiographical drama concerning a transgender preteen, Adri (Luana Giuliani), it is set in 1970s Rome, many years before gender recognition became a battleground – “You and Dad made me wrong,” 12-year-old Adri (formerly Andrea) tells his sparky, vulnerable mother, Clara (Cruz).
The immensity of the title refers to all the complications of growing up, struggles that are compounded by Adri’s wrestling with gender identity, his mother’s precarious mental health, and the disintegration of Clara’s marriage to Adri’s philandering, abusive father, Felice (Vincenzo Amato).
The playful Clara has few rules, save for forbidding Adri and his younger siblings, Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti), to cross through the reeds near their apartment, a thicket that leads to the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Naturally, the children waste little time in journeying to the shanty town beyond the shrubbery, where Andri finds puppy love with the teenaged Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti).
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
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The anchoring charisma of Penélope Cruz is well met by the newcomer Luana Giuliani. Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes are a welcome blaze of colours and polyester
Adri’s outsider status is mirrored by his mother’s societal standing. She’s a flighty Spaniard living in Italy; at an extended family get-together, she crawls under the table to act out alongside the children.
Her eventual breakdown is heavily signposted. The same traits that marginalise the pair find creative expression in Clara’s games, bops and singsongs, and in Adri’s wild, monochrome daydreams, including the family’s insertion into the 1972 TV airing of Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol, a famously gibberish approximation of English pop.
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L’Immensità is composed of several such striking scenes. The anchoring charisma of Penélope Cruz is well met by the newcomer Luana Giuliani. Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes are a welcome blaze of colours and polyester.
Somehow these lovely elements work against each other. Adri’s gorgeously staged fantasies offer a happy detour that ultimately undermines the film’s emotional gravitas. This remains, nonetheless, a charming coming-of-age portrait with a poignant sense of time and place.
L’Immensità is on limited release
