L'IMMENSITÀ - Mark Reviews Movies

L'Immensità, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

A small slice-of-story story with larger ambitions, L'Immensità keeps its characters at just enough distance that the movie never quite says as much as it believes it does. The inherent complexity of the main issues here, which range from gender identity to the effects of domestic violence, deserves a more specific touch, but co-writer/director Emanuele Crialese is working in such broad, as well as sometimes fantastical or intentionally vague, terms that the results are underwhelming.

There is, though, an undeniable sense of sincerity to everything within this little tale. It revolves around a family of five, recently moved to Rome at some point during the 1970s. One of the main characters is Andrew (a fine debut performance by Luana Giuliani), who identifies as a boy despite the insistence of just about everyone who knows the 12-year-old to refer to him by the name and gender assigned at birth (It should be noted in advance that, in this review, any instance that might refer to or suggest the character being identified in that way is only intended as a reflection of the attitudes of the other characters in the movie, since it happens quite a bit in this story). The other is the boy's mother Clara (Penélope Cruz), who knows her eldest child is "different" but, given the time period and the pressures of those around her, doesn't know how to process what she sees.

As a sort of compromise, Clara refers to Andrew as "Adri," a non-gendered nickname that, in Italian, could be the shorter version of either a traditionally masculine or feminine name. It's better than Andrew's father Felice (Vincenzo Amato), a conservative and work-focused man whose very presence in the house casts a dark cloud over the entire family. Early on, we see Clara and her three children, with Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti) being Andrew's younger siblings, setting the dinner table while dancing along to music. Whatever joy is present there is sucked out of the apartment immediately when Felice walks through the front door. He expects peace and quiet.

Clara's life, it seems, has become a series of compromises. The fact that the challenges of this character regularly match and sometimes overshadow those of the main character, who is ostensibly Andrew on account of the movie's narrow and limited perspective on everyone surrounding him, points toward one of the more significant issues with this movie. This is Andrew's story, but the screenplay by Crialese, Francesca Manieri, and Vittorio Moroni struggles to determine what that story actually is.

There is a certain generosity of storytelling in seeing so much of Clara, who has to negotiate or fight back against her controlling, philandering, and abusive husband—a man who expects perfection and everything he wants for himself from his family but barely seems capable of offering even his presence to them. An early scene has Andrew, awake in bed, overhearing his father forcing himself on Clara, despite her polite protests and more aggressive rejections, and it's only when the child intervenes that Felice stops.

One of the more devastating details of the family dynamic here is the way the children gradually begin to lose any sense of being children and any belief of being free in their own home. Poor Gino, silently terrified of getting in the way, begins defecating behind a door like a frightened pet. As the oldest child, Andrew has to be more than a sibling in this dynamic, and with everything else on his plate, it's often too much to bear.

In other words, the observations of this family are insightful and quietly heartbreaking, but this is not merely the story of how the family operates—or, as is so often the case in this tale, doesn't function—under the constant pressure and terror of this patriarch. It's also Clara's story, as the woman attempts to look and behave like the perfect wife and mother she's expected to be, while also protecting her children from Felice's anger and the family's reputation from her husband's hypocrisy (Felice's secretary arrives without warning one day, and Crialese covers up the conversation with music, because we don't need to hear it to know exactly what's being discussed).

Cruz is quite good in this role, playing a woman whose identity is so caught up in maintaining an illusion of normalcy that it's difficult for her to know who she is without that effort. In a way, then, the juxtaposition of Clara's story with Andrew's makes a certain thematic sense, since both characters are juggling social expectations and who they want to be, but Andrew's story doesn't come to life in the same way as the mother's. The kid deals with having his identity casually and repeatedly rejected, escapes from harsh reality by imagining himself and his mother as singers on television, and begins a youthfully innocent romance with a Roma girl named Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti).

Essentially, Andrew's story is in its early stages, and while L'Immensità is convincing in showing how a variety of circumstances prevent the character from forming or realizing any kind of set identity, that also means Andrew himself remains unclear and uncertain as a character beyond those circumstances. Ultimately, this doesn't feel as if it's his movie, in spite of the fact that the filmmakers clearly want it to be.

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