L’Immensità review: Penelope Cruz cannot save inconsistent drama

Penelope Cruz is an actor whose very presence elevates the material she is in. The Oscar-winner powers each of her roles with such magnetism and charm that its hard to look away when she’s on screen. In Italian director Emanuele Crialese’s L’Immensità, she stars as Clara, an urban housewife in 1970s Rome, who persistently covers the physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her husband by breaking into a dance with her kids, even slipping under the table to join them in pinching everyone’s legs in one scene. (Also read: Cassandro review: Gael García Bernal triumphs as a gay wrestler)

These scenes initially provide a welcome deviation, yet as electric as Cruz is, L’Immensità is not about Clara. This is a story about one of her kids, the eldest, who is a 12-year-old navigating her identity. Adriana (Luana Giulani), who also goes by the name of Adri, has issues pertaining to dysmorphia and covers herself in shirts and pants. She also regularly visits the Roma camp in the outskirts, where she forms a tender bond with a girl who might not have realized that she isn’t a boy.

The other children, Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and little Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti) are at ease when Clara is around, and witness the daily abuse by their father Felice (Vincenzo Amato). As L’Immensita tracks Andrea’s journey of self-discovery, and transforms into a stylized domestic tale, the stakes never cater to press the topic of trans experience- it rather invests in the unassuming brackets of parenthood and acceptance that never come together as a whole.

This is no Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodovar’s diabolically political film which premiered a year before L’Immensità at Venice, that knew its points of scrutiny. It also had Cruz channeling a mother torn against her own ambitions and presumptions. L’Immensita lacks that shift, clogging the narrative with more issues than it can employ. Crialese, who co-wrote the screenplay with Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni, pulls Andrea’s playful unpredictability with a laboured sense of passivity- often resorting to grand visual tricks. An extended black-and-white musical sequence arrives midway, without any of the intended bursts of shared exposition.

Andrea’s journey remains frustratingly unexplored, as L’Immensità moves ahead with one staged sequence after another, that grow repetitive after a point. The children witness their mother being abused, attempt to provide Clara with momentary support, and giddily try to dilute the effect in their public appearances. It lacks a sense of poise and control, ultimately closing in a disproportionately misleading finale.

Cruz, looking as ravishing as ever in her pearl earrings and short hair, is a ball of raw emotions- whose overexposition ultimately harms the understated questions of L’Immensità. However, the real find of Crialese’s well-intended yet overwrought drama is newcomer Luana Giuliani- who is a revelation as Andrea/Andri- constantly grounding the restless gaze of the narrative with her absorbing and curious presence.