“You and Dad made me wrong,” 12-year-old Andrea née Adriana (Giuliani) tells his mother, Clara (Cruz), in trying to explain his gender dysphoria in L’immensità, a vibrantly etched family drama set in 1970s Rome. In rationalizing his insistence on a male identity, Andrea confides that he hails from another galaxy, a sincere belief of extraterrestrial origins concocted from an adolescent inability to articulate what seem like unprecedented feelings for the time. “And you don’t have the power to fix me,” he matter-of-factly concludes, much to Clara’s veiled maternal concern. But the unconditional love that never wavers from Cruz’s astonishingly beautiful face in this scene is something you won’t forget. After Parallel Mothers and now this film, she may be the new madonna of contemporary cinema.
This heart-to-heart conversation is a tender moment in a film otherwise marked by the chaos of a patrician household coming undone, as the unhappy marriage between the nonconformist Clara (who may be manic-depressive) and her abusive husband, Felice (Amato), verges on collapse. Of the couple’s three children, eldest Adriana (“Adri”)/Andrea – with one exception, everyone in the film addresses the character by his birth name – is the offspring most affected by this familial turmoil. Sloe-eyed newcomer Giuliani, who identifies as a cisgender female in real life, is remarkable in a role that requires equal measures of innocence, sensitivity, and anger. (Her resemblance to Cruz is equally remarkable.) Whenever Andrea defends Clara against transgressive male behavior, his fiercely protective instincts are the flipped version of a lioness protecting her cub.
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. The filmmaker only really stumbles when fantasizing a black-and-white television variety show in which a masculinely dressed Andrea and blonde-bewigged Clara lip-sync musical numbers, similar to the monochromatic program the family watches on their set during the evening. The energy in these well-executed imaginary sequences is high – the two glamorized actors appear to be having a great time – but these fantasies don’t contribute much to the emotional narrative, particularly when used to end the film. Indeed, L’immensità concludes so unsatisfactorily you’re unsure whether the film is really over.
Of note: When Crialese presented this film at its Venice International Film Festival premiere last year, the filmmaker publicly revealed himself as a trans man for the first time. (He stressed, however, that he’d never been in the closet about his gender identity.) While the semi-autobiographical L’immensità is not directly based on his childhood, Crialese empathizes with the immensity of Andrea’s personal experience as someone who’s been there. Art reflecting life, life reflecting art.
This article appears in The Books Issue.
