Avis Metacritic

By showing the tangled relationship between a mother and her dysphoric child, L’Immensità writes a love letter to the lonely.

To say director Emanuele Crialese’s camera falls in love with Cruz would be an understatement. She is lovingly shot and framed (even her Sophia Loren bob brings attention to her expressive eyes) and we don’t even need to hear her speak to know whoever’s gaze she’s under has completely fallen under her spell.

For all its decorative twists and curls, this is a sophisticated, searching work.

Like so many Bildungsroman, it’s a tapestry crammed with incidental details, just as busy as the fantastic vintage-style prints on the women’s dresses and the flammable upholstery in the interiors. But then Crialese, who’s always been good with performers, will serve up a moment of achingly sad stillness.

A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.

The force of Cruz’s charisma — she’s like a cross between Sophia Loren and a solar flare — is more than enough to justify spending time with the family.

Everything in L’Immensità is beautiful even when everything wasn’t: Crialese’s odd, affecting memory piece layers the world as it was, is and could be in the same gilded frame.

In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.

I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.

As it is, the enormity of these feelings is trapped, lingering unexplored with nowhere to go, and the frustration felt as a viewer eventually gives way to disengagement.