L’Immensità

Director: Emanuele Crialese (Italy). Year of Release: 2022

Rome, the mid-1970s. An androgynous kid – either a very pretty boy or a slightly butch girl – is constructing a pentangle out of clothes lines or something, while looking up towards the skies. Adri believes that he is from another galaxy, and that his parents made him wrong and don’t have the power to fix him. The fabricated pentangle is part of a ritual in which he is appealing to a higher power to intervene by “making a miracle”.

Adri’s parents, including his sympathetic mother, persist in calling him his birth name Adriana – this is 1970s Italy, how could it be different? Adri would like to be called Andre, but everyone seems to have settled on an acceptable compromise. The Italy in which they are living is still very Catholic – Adri wears an ill-fitting dress to the segregated school, and in a very early scene gorges on communion hosts before nearly losing consciousness, gasping into his asthma inhaler.

Adri takes his younger siblings – Gino and Diana – through a thicket of cane to a campsite which is close to their upper-middle class house, but belongs to a different world. Seeing a young girl, Adri asks if they are gypsies. “We are workers”, she says – part of the Roma transient construction labourers who are temporarily allowed into the area which they are helping to gentrify. Adri introduces himself. As she is called away, they learn that her name is Sara.

Adri’s parents are dysfunctional – father Felice is violent and intolerant, while mother Clara is having a breakdown of her own. Felice is stern, while Clara is overprotective, banning her son from visiting Sara, the only person who accepts him for what he is. You get the feeling that Clara is doing this to protect her vulnerable child, not to further exclude him from society by casting him into the world of outcasts, but you can’t help feeling that there’s also a bit of snobbery in play too.

The film is as much about Clara as it is about Adri. She, too, is an unwelcome alien – an exile from Fascist Spain. For the first half of the film, I was dogged by how much Clara looked like Penélope Cruz, until I realised it was Penélope Cruz playing Italian (and doing it very well). Adri and Clara bond. In an early scene, we see an exhausted and broken Clara watching television with her son, who lovingly strokes her arms in a way that will give Freudian critics a field day.

But Clara is essentially childish. Before the opening credits we see her turning a breakfast preparation with the kids into a song and dance show. At a formal dinner, when the kids scurry beneath the tables, Clara joins them, saying “I want to play”, On a family visit, after all the kids have been lost in the sewers underneath their huge house, Clara relieves the tension by starting a water fight. And she runs through the busy streets with Adri screaming at the top of their voices.

Meanwhile, Felice is a brute, the sort of guy who expects his dinner on the table when he gets home. One evening Adri interrupts him attempting to rape Clara by hiding under their bed and shouting “stop it”. It is hardly a surprize when Felice’s secretary turns up at the front door, announcing to Clara that she was pregnant with her husband’s child. She asks Clara for support which is not only insensitive but also impractical – Clara is barely able to look after herself.

It is not just Felice who causes Clara grief – a simple walk through town where she is inevitably accompanied by catcalls is enough. She ushers Adri into the car, and the two try to escape the leering men in the street. Adri, unable to protect his mother, is crestfallen, demanding that she stop being so beautiful. On another occasion, noticing that she is made up, he says “you only wear make up if you’re going out or you’ve been crying”. And Clara does a lot of crying.

The whole family starts to suffer – Diana goes off her food, and Gino takes to shitting around the house. Clara retreats to a sanatorium where they’ll deal with her depression. Not long afterwards, the builders disappear, either because they finished their job, or were driven away. We have been watching an adolescent and unselfconscious love affair develop between Adri and Sara. Now, he has lost the two women/girls who brought any sense of meaning into his life.

L’Immensità director, Emanuele Crialese, who came out as trans as the film was being released, has made a film about the troubles of a young trans boy, where his sexuality is one of the least of these troubles. L’Immensità is about much more, and much less, than the trans experience. Handled badly, it could have been insensitive and a little annoying. Fortunately, a well-written script and impeccable acting makes it a story about real people, and not just stereotypes.

There is one aspect of the film which has divided the critics, and I must say, I’m still not sure whether it works. Every so often, the film goes into black and white the camera pans back and shows Adri or Clara miming to schmaltzy 1960s and 1970s Italian pop tunes (the film takes its name from one such song). Their characters, who have previously looked unable to control their lives, look confident and self-assured. They have temporarily escaped their humdrum existence.

It’s an ambitious switch, but does it work? I’m not really sure. There doesn’t seem to be enough reason for this to happen. It is such an abrupt break from the tone of the rest of the film without any real explanation. It is certainly stylistic, but has a disruptive effect on what has until then been fairly conventional narrative. And yet these scenes are memorable, and it’s probably better to try something this ambitious than to remain bland and safe.

L’Immensità is a film that is a little too episodic and incoherent at times, but at least it is trying something interesting. Even the bits that don’t fully work are memorable. That’s surely enough reason to give it a go.