L’Immensità Review: Emanuele Crialese Finds The Symbol Of The Visionary Musical (Venice 79)
Cast: Luana Giuliani, Penelope Cruz, Vincenzo Amato, Aurora Quattrocchi
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three and a half star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
L’Immensità Review: Our gaze that is lost upwards, meeting the vastness of the sky, is one of the things that, when we are children or young people, is an integral part of our visual and emotional horizon. Getting lost in the sky, in the infinite shapes of the clouds, or in the stars that dot the nocturnal mantle, which is also an existential step through which, as a child, it was inevitable to pass, an opportunity to experiment with fantasy and free rein. So does Adriana, a twelve-year-old in the Rome of the 70s who feels herself the daughter of aliens, or at least not belonging to this planet, thus turning her eyes to the sky in search of her phantom origins. Emanuele Crialese turned to her origins with this story inspired in part by his history and his family life, which we will talk about in our review of L’Immensità.
L’Immensità Review: The Story
In the high-bourgeois Rome of the seventies, the family made up of Clara, Felice and their three children, Adriana the eldest, Gino (about 10 years old) and Patrizia (5-6 years old) navigate between social events, holidays and anniversaries in the family. It is a pity, however, that the two spouses no longer love each other and that Felice is a systematic traitor. Furthermore, Adriana does not accept her biological feminine identity, thus calling herself Andrea, cutting her hair short and assuming masculine attitudes. Clara is the only one in the family, and in the social context of reference, to accept Adriana’s condition and, to escape her unhappiness, she becomes an accomplice and playmate of her children.
The background of the story is the Rome of the 70s, where Carla (Cruz) and Felice (Vincenzo Amato) live with their three children: Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti), Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Adriana (Luana Giuliani). The latter, twelve years old, refuses her name by calling herself Andrea, feeling like a boy and sure she was born in the wrong body. The young woman experiences her feelings with difficulty, exacerbated by the crisis that has been wearing down the relationship of her parents for some time now. While she witnesses the progressive mental collapse of her mother, Adriana meets Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti), a peer who lives in the shacks of a field that separates a reed bed from her home, with whom she establishes a precious friendship.
L’Immensità Review and Analysis
The words with which Marlon Brando ironically referred to the family in Last Tango in Paris, or as a place where children are tortured, they will be broken by repression and freedom murdered by selfishness, seem appropriate to the family unit described in L’Immensity. Felice not only betrays Clara but blames her for Adriana’s identity oddities, for which they are mocked and pointed at by the context of friends and relatives they frequent. According to her spouse, Clara’s complicity with her children and especially with Adriana is deleterious and detrimental, and would therefore be at the basis of the girl’s psychological distortions, as well as her perpetually living in the clouds.
Among other things, hearing about divorce, the man starts and threatens his wife: the most important thing is his social appearance. Clara, an intense and visceral Penelope Cruz, thus vents her frustration and sadness by finding the child in herself and thus letting her vent with her children, as can be seen in the now already iconic scene of the table setting on the notes of Noise by Raffaella Carrà. The family, a theme so dear to Crialese, becomes the place where the individual expression is suffocated, a slave but at the same time an advocate of patriarchal logic that 50 years ago was the norm, and of which it still carries the aftermath. There is very little space left for play or anomaly in a house where the rule of silence imposed by the father figure is in force.
Mamma Clara is the first to be a prisoner of this condition, from which she tries as best she can to make her children escape, urging them every time she has the opportunity to make themselves heard, to make that “noise” which is the title of the song by Raffaella Carrà that the woman loves to dance with children. Leaving the track, even if it is to reclaim one’s individuality, is nevertheless not contemplated by a society devoured by the hypocrisy that insists on seeing the error in the other, in the “different”, but which allows a man to have relationships extramarital and then return to the hearth and demand that his wife satisfy all his requests. Growing up in such a context, the life that surrounds her cannot offer Adriana the answers she seeks for her, forcing her to look elsewhere.
Her eyes thus turn to the sky, in the hope that mysterious aliens will bring her to safety her hands make their way through the reeds to reach Sara, where she finds someone to open her heart to; her ears isolate the voices of the surrounding adults to accommodate the notes of the songs sung by the black and white icons on the TV. Reluctant to share the feelings she feels, it is exactly by impersonating the stars of Italian music that Adriana expresses her interiority. Crialese prepares real musical numbers that recreate immortal performances of the Italian small screen, for example putting the young woman in the role of Adriano Celentano and Carla in those of Carrà while singing Prisencolinensinainciusol. As often happens in the author’s filmography, in a reality where a hand is rarely extended to us, the illusion is the way out, be it music or the promise of a world without walls that Grazia saw in the sea in Breath.
What works great in L’immensity is the immersion in the games of children and youngsters, or the assumption of their point of view and the total identification in that enchantment that was the age between 10 and 13 years, where everything was the discovery and play and we detached ourselves from the world of adults to create imaginary worlds and new identities. A game that the group of friends and cousins plays at Christmas, while the adults chat at the table, is based on the latter: they blindfold their eyes and, based on tactile sensations alone, they must recognize each other. Therefore, find the identity of those close to you, not based on prejudices and click, but on the simple sensation of contact, with the epidermis. It is Adriana who proposes this game, almost as if, blindfolded, his real identity can finally blossom out, without fear of being judged. A bit like when, as a child, if we closed our eyes and didn’t see the world, not even the world could see us.
And Clara enters this world perfectly, as a refuge from the sad and squalid family menage, but also because the girl inside her has never really dormant. It is precisely in the scenes of play and intimacy between Cruz and the young actors who play the children, in which Luana Giuliani stands out in the role of Adriana, that L’immensity finds its happiest moments, as well as its strongest emotional pick for engaging him viewer and make him empathize with Clara, Adriana and their family. After Cuarón, Sorrentino and Branagh, Crialese too therefore finds inspiration in his family life, obviously transfigured, to create a personal and at the same time universal work, which tackles many crucial and current issues still today.
L’Immensità Review: The Last Words
With L’Immensità, Emanuele Crialese finds the symbol of the visionary musical to effectively express the discomfort of a girl in search of her identity, even if, in the long run, the mechanism gets tired. The family as a repressive institution and fantasy and play as possible relief valves and expression find an effective narrative declination in the story inspired by the life of the director himself. Penelope Cruz adds, with her vital and sunny interpretation of her, extra gear to an exciting film that tells of terribly current issues.
