L'immensità

A Spanish woman (Penelope Cruz) marries an Italian jerk (Vincenzo Amato) that, after making her three kids, starts cheating on her. She tries to keep her marriage together and her kids oblivious of the drama she goes through, but the situation is so bad that even the kids realize that in their family love is just a word. One of the kids, Adri, is a girl that dreams to be a boy - and acts towards that, dressing like a boy and pretending to be called Andrea, not Adriana.

This is the starting point (you learn all this in the first five minutes) - but the story doesn't really go anywhere, it's just a collection of moments in the dissolution of a plausible family (my father and a lot of his friends were just like Felice - yes, women really had a very hard time in the 70s).

So don't watch this movie for the story, watch it for Penelope. She's amazing.

I love art house Italian films from the 1970s so I wanted to see L'immensita but I found myself underwhelmed. The film is pretty, but not beautiful. It's artful but not terribly interesting. The musical moments were lovely but did not uplift a claustrophobic tale about a 12 year old trans boy obsessed with his unhappy mother. The emphasis here is on the experience of late childhood and puberty, the suffering of a trans adolescent resisting their given gender role in traditional society, and there's little escape into the wider world of Rome in the 1970s beyond a tween's impression taken from movies and television.

The movie is mostly sad and boring, and while I sympathize with the director I guess I am just not the target audience here. Also, I felt that the mother's supposed mental illness was too understated, too subtle. I didn't get that she was crazy, just miserable and looking for joy where she could find it with her kids, as she certainly couldn't have it with her husband.

This movie is, for the admission of his on author, inspired to Crialese's childhood. I could feel from the beginning to the end the difficulty of Andrea to accept his body, the inability to watch himself on the mirror or to show himself shirtless in front of other. Some amusement helps counterbalance the heaviness of the family situation, I'm referring to the musical parts of the movie which are not only beautifully shot but help understanding how the central character would like to be seen by others, in contrast to what he sees looking at the mirror. Sure, this is not an action movie, you won't find a clear villain (although certainly the father does not come out well) or an ending, yet it kept me glued to the screen for the whole duration of the film.

The movie projects a background history; that of an unhappy middle class family due to the careless and extremely restrictive character of the father. We see the older daughter, Adriana's rebellious attitude towards her father's loveless dominance and inability to care for his wife or children. When the movie starts, Adriana has already rejected her female, fragile and womanizing features. Adriana rejects everything that her mother is, but also looks after her since her father humiliates Clara, her mother . Gino also rebels and manifests his unhappiness by defecating around the house. The mother is evidently distraught and looking for ways to feel happy in a bland world which flows between drinking, smoking and her time with her children. A beautiful photography, a good script and very good acting of Penelope Cruz. Very realistic and plausible, beautiful in its own drama.

How frustrating it can be when you watch a movie that has a lot of tremendous moments but doesn't hang together well as a complete whole. Such is the case with this latest offering from writer-director Emanuele Crialese, which tells the story of a family in the midst of multiple domestic crises. Set in Rome in the 1970s, the picture follows the life of Clara (Penélope Cruz), the depressed wife and mother of three who's married to an abusive, philandering, often-disconnected husband (Vincenzo Amato), and her attempts to cope with her circumstances. Clara loves her children dearly, but the young ones all have challenges of their own, especially her eldest, Adriana (Luana Giuliani), a teen who's struggling with gender identity issues. Clara and Adriana seek various forms of escape, as depicted in several fantasy sequences and regular forms of play (all captured with a terrific sense of humor), but are those diversions enough to take away their heartache? The film also seeks to address a number of Italian cultural matters, such as the privileged role of men and the expected subservient place of women, dynamics that unfold in the principal narrative as well as in ancillary story threads. Sadly, while these are all noteworthy elements of the story, there's a little too much going on for the picture to hold everything together cohesively, especially when crammed into is relatively brief 1:37:00 runtime. Also, a number of the story's aspects are presented a little too vaguely for my taste, leaving them open more to ambiguous, unfocused interpretation than bona fide nuance. To its credit, however, when the sequences work, they do so quite effectively, in large part thanks to the fine performances of Giuliani and, particularly, Cruz, whose ravishing elegance recalls a young Sophia Loren. It's unfortunate that this offering isn't better fleshed out; it could have stood to either have some elements cut out completely or to expand and elaborate on the overall narrative. As it stands now, however, this release feels choppy, underdeveloped and incomplete, despite the strength of those aforementioned moments. Those are the sequences that make this offering work; it's just a shame that there weren't more of them and that they were better tied together.