Penélope Cruz in L’Immensità [Angelo R Turetta]

L’IMMENSITÀ
Directed by Emanuele Crialese
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

ROME looks good on the outside, but hides a rotten core beneath its prosperous bustle. This contradicting city provides the backdrop for this family drama, a story where the outwardly good-looking leads, like the city that cradles them, have deep issues when you peel back the layers.

Adri (Luana Giuliani) is a teenager who was born a girl but wants to be a boy.

She has a sense that she is not the product of her parents Clara (Penelope Cruz) and Felice (Vincenzo Amato) – and instead, surrounded by the stories of the Catholic church, finds it no giant leap of imagination to think she may have been born an alien.

She introduces us to a family led by Clara, who is up against a beast of a husband.

Felice is a well-drawn nasty piece of work (and Amato is superb at portraying this troubled, confused, violent and weak macho man). He attempts to rape Clara in the marital bed, but she doesn’t dare to ask for a divorce. The Italian Catholic way was to separate and have the marriage annulled, as if the betrothal never took place – a sleight of hand to ensure unhappy marriages were escapable but the sanctity of institution was not corrupted in the eyes of the Church.

Tobias Jones, in his 2003 book The Dark Heart of Italy, explains how this system illustrates the Italians’ contempt for rules, but respect for the myriad of ways of bending them.

Jones writes about the contradiction between the all-encompassing role the Church plays in Italian life while the people make necessary compromises to validate their wants, mores and bad behaviour. We see that writ large here.

Crialese brings alive Italian pop culture through the use of music, TV shows, a brilliantly dressed cast, and the walk-on characters who show how Clara isn’t just up against a violent husband but a society convinced of a right and proper way of conducting itself.