Movie Review: L'immensita

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A-

A beautiful coming of age film from Italy.

This film has a very simple storyline. A transgender boy growing up in 1970's Rome feels like none of his family understands him and watches as his parent's marriage falls apart. As simple as the story is the emotions it will evoke are anything but simplistic. This is at once both a film filled with great joy and one that will truly break your heart. Both the joyous moments and the heartbreaking moments feel completely authentic. Director/Writer, Emanuele Crialese based much of this movie off of his own childhood and even if you did not know this going in, you can fully feel it. This is not a film about gender identity, mental illness, the collapse of a marriage, infidelity or spousal abuse (although all of these appear in the movie). Instead this is a film about human beings. As the film goes on, we truly care about these characters deeply as if they are our own friends. There are many times in which we simply want to reach out and give them a hug. The heart of this movie is in the mother and child relationship. This relationship is far from simplistic in any way. You can tell that the two truly do care about each other, but you can also tell that neither of them understands the other. The mother can't understand her child calling himself a boy and why he wants to go off to an abandoned area during his free time (it is because there is a girl he meets there, who seems to be the only person, who kind of understands him). The complicated relationship he has with his mother is expressed in two especially great scenes. One of these he tries to defend his mother when some creepy guys hit on her followed by his reaction to her calling herself ugly, and the other one is when she wishes to go under the table to play a child's game with the children at a party. These two scenes perfectly show how complex this relationship is but in a way that feels perfectly real and relatable. This relationship and these characters feel all the more real with the incredible performances of both Penélope Cruz and Luana Giuliani, both of whom simply light up the screen whenever they appear. This movie also does a wonderful job of balancing its mature themes and heartbreaking moments with moments of great humor and joy. Yet the humorous and fun scenes never feel out of place but instead seem to stem directly from the story and never dimmish the more heartbreaking moments. 

This is a wonderful movie.