L’Immensità (2022)
In 1970s Italy, gender fluidity, far more than a predicament, becomes a battleground
Adriana (Luana Guiliani) and her mother Clara (Penélope Cruz) search for a way forward
L’Immensità (2022)
Now in theaters
Is this simply a trans coming-of-age story? About a young person hovering on the border between male and female, yearning to creep – or maybe run loudly, defiantly – across society’s stark line between genders?
Well, yes, it highlights that unsettling, dislodging struggle. But it’s more. It’s a transformation story that’s wearing a disguise. Family is where identity begins for any of us.
In 1970s Rome, Adriana (Luana Guiliani) has just turned 12 and wears her hair short, with a seductive curl hanging over her eyes, like swaggering boys in ’50s movies. “You and Dad had me wrong,” she tells her baffled mother Clara (Penélope Cruz).
Yearning to be a boy, Adriana prefers to be called by the less gender-specific “Adri”. Her younger brother Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and sister Diana (María Goretti) realize sooner than Clara does that their boundary-breaking sister is headed for disillusionment.
It comes, unsurprisingly, in the form of a devastatingly pretty girl, Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti), who looks roughly Adri’s age.
She comes from a community of itinerant workers living nearby in a shanty town behind a thicket of tall reeds, a convenient geographical boundary Clara orders her middle-class children never to cross.
When Adri can’t resist finding out who lives behind those reeds, she’s immediately smitten by Sara, who unhesitatingly assumes Adriana is a boy.
Adri, seeing she’s getting away with her deception, goes full bore and calls herself by the name she pines to adopt, “Andrew”.
I relished this push and pull. Because it signaled that beneath what seems like inescapable, almost banal unhappiness beats an acute suffering, where hopes are being snuffed out, possible lives crushed by mistreatment.
Before long they’re frolicking across fields and swooning as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Kissing sets both their faces alight.
We soon understand why such an adventure would so deeply appeal to Adri.
Clara’s marriage to Felice (Vincenzo Amato) has deteriorated into joyless misery. Felice is cruelly sexually demanding and turns violent whenever Clara or his children displease him. (He’s also having an affair with his secretary.)
We sense that part of the reason Adri wants to be a boy is to become a better man than her brutal, out-of-control father.
Despite feeling trapped in a disastrous marriage, Clara has a vibrant relationship with her children, and the four of them giddily escape into fantasies, picturing themselves singing and dancing like the glamorous figures in the slick variety acts they watch on television.
They pull pleasure from a glowing box to suppress their pain.
Clara can turn setting the table for dinner into a whirling dance routine, and around the house the children sing and spiral with her in impromptu routines.
But the root of this playfulness is a familial torment that’s consuming them all.
Children in distress: Adriana (Luana Guiliani), Diana (María Goretti) and Gino (Patrizio Francioni)
Clara must act to save her children from a father who’s become heartless.
And Adri needs to settle on an identity – boy or girl, choose Adri! – that can actually be lived out.
Writer-director Emanuele Crialese and co-writers Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni have crammed their lively, heart-rending story nearly to the breaking point.
We see, for instance, a truly scary episode when a group of children hide and become trapped underground in a warren of tunnels. They’re freed, but it’s not clear why we’ve been put through the wringer.
This blend of the harshly realistic and in-the-clouds escapism makes for a sometimes-disorienting mix.
Felice (another discordancy: his name means “happy”) savagely slaps his wife and children and roars with terrifying rage when he’s not obeyed.
In marked contrast, the fantasy dance routines are mounted and costumed with alarming high style; they’re so splendid they not only underscore but sometimes seem to mock the family’s desperation.
Yet I relished this push and pull. Because it signaled that beneath what seems like inescapable, almost banal unhappiness beats an acute suffering, where hopes are being snuffed out, possible lives crushed by mistreatment.
Relief feels as imperative as oxygen.
This urgency underlies Cruz’s galvanizing performance. Her vitality here is never superfluous, mere showing off, letting go for the camera just because she’s a breathtakingly beautiful star.
As the troubled Clara, Cruz enlists her mesmerizing beauty to do the rough work of revelation
She’s indisputably that, but the way she moves her body with trepidation, casts those disarmingly large eyes in distress, tosses that bewitching hair in defiance, she’s expressing a longing for release that anyone in danger will recognize.
Whenever I’ve seen Cruz, no matter the role, she reaches the universal. Her work always has a fine actor’s precision. But she also takes you to what “might be” for the character.
Here, as in other movies, the closing shot on her by no means indicates the character’s defeat. Those voracious eyes still want more.
The movie’s find is Guiliani as Adriana. She can pull off a boy’s budding seductiveness and yet leave you fully aware that the identity battle isn’t won, Adriana isn’t yet who she wants to be, and won’t get there easily.
As with Clara, the young protagonist comes to realize that the struggle to define oneself doesn’t have a clearcut ending or a guaranteed tranquil outcome, not even in adulthood.
No matter where you end up, or position yourself, on the sexual continuum, you’re still left with figuring out how to seize your freedom.
That’s what the movie’s title – The Immensity – invites us to consider. It insists that the world is big enough for any of us to embrace more than one identity.
And, this story wants to say, no matter how arduous that journey might become, how sad our lives will surely be if we don’t try.