L’Immensita Review: Emanuele Crialese’s Vividly Memoristic Portrait of a Parent-Child Bond

Well-intentioned films about marginalized people face the pitfall of reducing characters’ lives to their experience of persecution. Black characters in Hollywood’s anti-racist parables tend to stand in for a monolithic Black experience, while gay characters have often been defined solely by their sexuality. Emanuele Crialese’s autobiographical L’Immensita, a drama about a transgender preteen, Adri (Luana Giuliani), in early-’70s Italy, skirts this trap by capturing the textures and tensions of a life that’s not defined solely by anti-trans oppression.

As the film depicts with a certain resigned whimsy, Adri not only copes with routine teenage angst, but is also caught within a web of intersecting inequities, including domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and class prejudice. 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.

Giuliani’s character was born Adriana. He tells his adoring mother, Clara (Penélope Cruz), in one scene that he’s Andrew, but seems to have compromised with her and the other adults in his life on the reasonably gender-ambiguous “Adri.” He never explicitly expresses a preference for masculine pronouns, but it could hardly be clearer that Adri thinks of himself as a boy, and he begins living a secret, second life among people who perceive him as male.

Early in L’Immensita, Adri and his younger siblings, Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti), cross through the thicket of reeds that borders the new apartment they’ve moved into and discover a workers’ shanty town. There they meet a girl, Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti), with whom Adri begins a teenaged flirtation that allows him to truly be Andrew, at least for temporary stretches. And he soon has additional reason to escape his family’s well-apportioned but somewhat cramped apartment, as his parents’ marriage is crumbling, and his father, Felice (Vincenzo Amato), is becoming increasingly abusive.

Cialese and co-screenwriters Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni style the Sara subplot as Andri’s most material fantastical escape to a realm where the identities people are tied to in everyday life dissipate. Black-and-white television is another such transitory non-place. At one point, the siblings and their mother watch the original airing of Adriano Celentano’s famous “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a catchy pop-song-as-satire in which the singer mocks the popularity of anything that sounds vaguely English by spouting English-sounding gibberish.

The song is almost by definition a palimpsest, and to Cialese that would seem to be the redemptive aspect of pop culture, at least for those invested in suspending the confines of their reality. Later, Adri recreates this flamboyant performance in his mind, casting himself as Celentano’s loose-limbed hobo-esque character and his mother as the singer’s bleached-blond backup. That this mother-son collaboration can only be fully realized in fantasy is emphasized by a later scene where Clara attempts to join Adri and his cousins playing underneath a giant dining table but is rebuffed by Adri, who reminds her that she should be with the adults.

Cruz delivers a powerful performance as the exceptionally kind but increasingly frayed Clara, but the standout is Giuliani as the steely eyed but deeply sensitive Adri. This young person simmers with an angst that those living in the ’70s barely had a language to express—or, at least, an angst that typically isn’t voiced in a deeply Catholic community within which he and his family live. One sees in Giuliani’s sullen, knowing glares the way Adri has already begun to choose their battles—to, effectively, save the trauma for later in order to survive the moment.

Adri has reached that period of early teenagedom in which adults haven’t quite clocked the child’s enhanced understanding of their environs. “What’s more important: What’s on the inside, or what’s on the outside?” he asks his science teacher when the latter explains, in reference to cell anatomy, that inside everything is something different. Growing more perceptive with experience, Adri takes on much of the burden as his family begins to crumble.

The immensity referred to in the title may be this burden, but Cialese intermingles the story’s heavier stuff with a lively sense of childlike wonder, so that the dips toward melodrama never feel unduly onerous. In a way, L’Immensita is reminiscent of another recent memoiristic film about marginal identities at the end of the 20th century, James Gray’s Armageddon Time. Here, as there, the perpetual crisis that is postwar society cannot be redeemed once and for all, but surviving it without reconciling oneself to it might be the first crucial step.