It’s easy to make a movie about families helping each other and loving one another. It’s also easy to make a psychotic family that gets into all sorts of crazy shenanigans. It’s MUCH harder to go about just telling a story about a stressed out, unhappy but normal family. L’immensita walks the line pretty well: easier to do when Penelope Cruz is running the household.
From the naked eye, Clara (Cruz) and her family would appear like any other Italian family. But look a little closer, and you see some issues. Clara’s husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) is never home, and when he is, the tension can be cut with a knife. Poor Adriana (Luana Giuliani), the couple’s oldest child, is experiencing gender dysmorphia, not great for a kid in the 1970s when the movie is set. And Clara herself feels the title (meaning immensity) on her shoulders, slowly pushing her towards her breaking point.
L’immensita is better than most movies at capturing the day to day beats of a sad family. Not everyday is sad; there’s a couple moments here and there that are legitimately fun for the family like boat trips or setting the table to Italian pop music. But during the quiet moments, there’s an air of discomfortability and melancholy that lives in this family’s apartment. Occasionally there are outbursts, but they’re usually between two characters behind closed doors; however, the outbursts are overheard by the others, who internalize that sadness but have no idea how to deal with it in a healthy way. That means we see the classic coping mechanisms for the time: Felice yells, one of the kids overeats, Adriana runs away or gets into trouble, and Clara chooses to bury and move forward. This uneasy stasis pushes and pushes on everyone in the family, and we start to see which of these parents/kids have stronger compositions than the others. It’s heartbreaking stuff over time, but for the most part, well told and effective at helping people understand what unhappy families can look like in the real world.
Man, is there anything Penelope Cruz cannot do? She’s as good in Italian as she has been in Spanish and English. Her Clara here is a woman that’s in a glass case of emotion. She does her best for her kids, but that’s just a face: in reality, she’s pretty fragile and living in arrested development, longing for childhood that has since passed her by. Cruz conveys this complex desolation like the pro that she is, yet another stellar performance in a career full of them. Luana Giuliani is still young, so she’s got some stuff to learn to become a great actress. She’s best in the smaller stuff, away from the great Penelope Cruz, like in her little fantasy with the gypsy girl Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti) who happily treats Adri like a boy, and with her younger siblings (a totally believable relationship).
L’immensita for sure. That type of immensity would consume me, and probably break me. I’m not made of the hard stuff like Adri. So shout out to all the weak ones, trying their best but never quite figuring it out. Maybe you will someday, but if you don’t that’s ok. What’s most important is getting back up and trying again.