‘L’Immensita’: Venice Review

Dir: Emanuele Crialese. Italy/France. 2022. 98 mins.

Rome in the early 1970s is a city which is rebuilding. But in order to do so, it must first destroy itself. It’s a pointedly appropriate backdrop for this spirited domestic portrait of sparky, unpredictable Clara (Penelope Cruz), her casually unfaithful husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato), and their three children. Resigned to the fact that her marriage is all but over, Clara channels her attention into the kids, the oldest of whom, Adri (well-cast newcomer Luana Giuliani) was christened Adriana, but prefers to live as Andrew, just one of many flashpoints between Clara and her husband. The latest picture from Emanuele Crialese takes its tonal cue from its central character. Like Clara, it is a beguiling and multifaceted entity. But at the same time, it is also erratic and occasionally frustrating. Still, the force of Cruz’s charisma — she’s like a cross between Sophia Loren and a solar flare — is more than enough to justify spending time with the family.

Seen through the prism of the family, we get a sense of Rome as a pressure cooker

The film’s premiere in Competition at Venice marks a return to the festival for the Rome-born Crialese, who won the Special Jury prize there for Terraferma in 2011 and the Silver Lion in 2006 for Nuovomundo. But of his previous pictures, L’Immensita perhaps has most in common with his second film, Respiro: both deal with unconventional mother figures, both explore the theme of not quite fitting into society’s proscribed roles. The marketable combination of Cruz’s stellar performance and the picture’s peppy use of music, dance and period pop culture should ensure that the film will attract interest both from further festivals and from arthouse distributors. 

The rigid expectations of comfortably well-off Roman society can feel like a prison for anyone who doesn’t tick all the boxes and social norms. Someone like 12-year-old Adri, who affects a macho bluster and storms in with fists and fury if Clara’s beauty attracts the wrong kind of attention. Or indeed someone like Clara: as a Spaniard, she’s an outsider in Rome. But she’s also on the fringes of the adult world, happier to play than to discipline. Setting the dinner table with her children requires a ritual song-and-dance routine; she declares an unwelcome unilateral water fight on the other mothers after a children’s holiday adventure requires emergency intervention. But even the gender non-conforming Adri feels at times that Clara’s free spirit needs containing. And even the mother who encourages freedom and expression sets a few key rules: not to go through the bamboo thickets to where the gypsy families have set up camp — a rule that Adri wastes no time breaking.

Both Clara and Adri create their own worlds, fantasy escape routes from slights and disappointments. And for both, music is the key. Clara orchestrates lip-synced extravaganzas with her children. Adri’s escape is into imaginary musical numbers, ripped from black-and-white television variety shows, the recycled entertainment piped into their living room which is already anachronistic, at odds with the colour popping palette of the early-70s Roman cityscape (costumes are a highlight, an explosion of synthetics, scorching citrus tones and bold graphic patterns). 

Seen through the prism of the family, we get a sense of the city as a pressure cooker, with both Adri and Clara on the verge of detonation. And it’s perhaps this — the nervy, itching restlessness of the film’s first hour — which makes its somewhat muted ending seem something of a let-down.