L'Immensità: Meine fantastische Mutter

It's a family drama with a transgender subplot set in 1970 in Rome, Italy. It follows a summer in the life of a dysfunctional family.

Clara (Penélope Cruz) is the mother of three children. She is devoted to her children but has a rocky relationship with her philandering and abusive husband, Felice (Vincenzo Amato). Their oldest child, Adriana/Adri/Andrew (Luana Giuliani), is 12 years old, born as a girl but identifies as a boy. Gino (Patrizio Francioni) is a younger brother, and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti) is perhaps a six-year-old girl.

Adri develops a summer friendship with a Romany girl named Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti), during which they identifies as Andrew. Their parents and extended family resist Adri's identification, though Clara is sympathetic. Eventually, the family encounters two crises, and Adri tries to escape through fantasy. "L'immensità" ends inconclusively.

The director came out as transgender with the release of this film. "L'immensità" tends to wander a bit but reflects a family in crisis very well. Cruz is probably too attractive for her role and tends to overshadow Luana Giuliani, who deserves great credit for a demanding and complex role.

This movie is, for the admission of his on author, inspired to Crialese's childhood. I could feel from the beginning to the end the difficulty of Andrea to accept his body, the inability to watch himself on the mirror or to show himself shirtless in front of other. Some amusement helps counterbalance the heaviness of the family situation, I'm referring to the musical parts of the movie which are not only beautifully shot but help understanding how the central character would like to be seen by others, in contrast to what he sees looking at the mirror. Sure, this is not an action movie, you won't find a clear villain (although certainly the father does not come out well) or an ending, yet it kept me glued to the screen for the whole duration of the film.

Saw this back at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

L'immensita is a story about the love between the character Clara and her children, set in Rome in the '70s. Emanuele Crialese previous films has proven he has talent with directing, production and narrative style as I have enjoyed his previous works. Unfortunately while L'immensità is well performed from Penélope Cruz and extremely colorful production and camerawork, the film suffers from an uneven tone and generic narrative.

The narrative is pretty simple and each moment that happens was pretty predictable of what steps it was heading for. The tone of the film is the most confusing part as the film isn't sure if the film wants to become a drama, comedy or comedy-drama at the same time. Most of the characters were not as interesting as Crialese thinks they were as many of their arches felt underdeveloped and dull. While Cruz's performance was fantastic, the child performances were a mix of being decent or pretty poor. I don't like to criticize child actors since I understand they aren't as professional as adult actors but the uneven performance does feel distracting at times.

The film isn't fully terrible as the soundtrack is pretty good, the production and camerawork is colorful and fits the time period, and the film doesn't have a bad pacing which does help to make the film still be interesting at certain levels. But the film could have use some work with better writing and characters. Overall, there are some interesting moments but the uneven narrative and weak characters wasn't able to fully make the film as impactful as it wants to be.

Rating: C+

How frustrating it can be when you watch a movie that has a lot of tremendous moments but doesn't hang together well as a complete whole. Such is the case with this latest offering from writer-director Emanuele Crialese, which tells the story of a family in the midst of multiple domestic crises. Set in Rome in the 1970s, the picture follows the life of Clara (Penélope Cruz), the depressed wife and mother of three who's married to an abusive, philandering, often-disconnected husband (Vincenzo Amato), and her attempts to cope with her circumstances. Clara loves her children dearly, but the young ones all have challenges of their own, especially her eldest, Adriana (Luana Giuliani), a teen who's struggling with gender identity issues. Clara and Adriana seek various forms of escape, as depicted in several fantasy sequences and regular forms of play (all captured with a terrific sense of humor), but are those diversions enough to take away their heartache? The film also seeks to address a number of Italian cultural matters, such as the privileged role of men and the expected subservient place of women, dynamics that unfold in the principal narrative as well as in ancillary story threads. Sadly, while these are all noteworthy elements of the story, there's a little too much going on for the picture to hold everything together cohesively, especially when crammed into is relatively brief 1:37:00 runtime. Also, a number of the story's aspects are presented a little too vaguely for my taste, leaving them open more to ambiguous, unfocused interpretation than bona fide nuance. To its credit, however, when the sequences work, they do so quite effectively, in large part thanks to the fine performances of Giuliani and, particularly, Cruz, whose ravishing elegance recalls a young Sophia Loren. It's unfortunate that this offering isn't better fleshed out; it could have stood to either have some elements cut out completely or to expand and elaborate on the overall narrative. As it stands now, however, this release feels choppy, underdeveloped and incomplete, despite the strength of those aforementioned moments. Those are the sequences that make this offering work; it's just a shame that there weren't more of them and that they were better tied together.

I love art house Italian films from the 1970s so I wanted to see L'immensita but I found myself underwhelmed. The film is pretty, but not beautiful. It's artful but not terribly interesting. The musical moments were lovely but did not uplift a claustrophobic tale about a 12 year old trans boy obsessed with his unhappy mother. The emphasis here is on the experience of late childhood and puberty, the suffering of a trans adolescent resisting their given gender role in traditional society, and there's little escape into the wider world of Rome in the 1970s beyond a tween's impression taken from movies and television.

The movie is mostly sad and boring, and while I sympathize with the director I guess I am just not the target audience here. Also, I felt that the mother's supposed mental illness was too understated, too subtle. I didn't get that she was crazy, just miserable and looking for joy where she could find it with her kids, as she certainly couldn't have it with her husband.