Critic Reviews

By showing the tangled relationship between a mother and her dysphoric child, L’Immensità writes a love letter to the lonely.

A painful, heart-rending coming of age drama, L’immensità, which translates as “immensity,” is a sensitive, painful prize winner from the Venice Film Festival that mirrors the ethos and intensity of a tortured family’s experience in a time of change.

To say director Emanuele Crialese’s camera falls in love with Cruz would be an understatement. She is lovingly shot and framed (even her Sophia Loren bob brings attention to her expressive eyes) and we don’t even need to hear her speak to know whoever’s gaze she’s under has completely fallen under her spell.

For all its decorative twists and curls, this is a sophisticated, searching work.

Like so many Bildungsroman, it’s a tapestry crammed with incidental details, just as busy as the fantastic vintage-style prints on the women’s dresses and the flammable upholstery in the interiors. But then Crialese, who’s always been good with performers, will serve up a moment of achingly sad stillness.

A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.

There is a vitality and a quiet defiance to this kind of filmmaking that is difficult to resist.

Of the two main characters, Clara provides the tonal touchstone for the film. Like her, the picture spins off into moments of unpredictable fantasy – musical numbers inspired by television variety shows. Music – peppy Italian pop, schmaltzy ballads – is inventively employed throughout, but the use of colour and costume is particularly evocative.

Veteran Italian director and co-screenwriter Crialese (Respiro, Golden Door) embraces a vivid visual sense here, abetted by Gergeley Pohárnok’s sumptuous cinematography and the Me Decade fashion sense of Massimo Cantini Parrini’s breezy, eye-popping couture. It’s a look that idealizes memory, much like when you conjure up something from the past in your mind and try to make it stick there for a while.

By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or mawkish, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood.