L'immensità (2022)

L’immensità is special because it treats a child’s search for self not as a “topic,” but as lived reality—tender, confusing, and brave—set against a Rome that feels sunlit on the surface and bruised underneath. Emanuele Crialese paints the 1970s with intoxicating color and costume, then lets the visuals do the emotional heavy lifting as a family tries to survive what they can’t say out loud. Penélope Cruz is quietly incandescent as Clara, a mother whose protective love becomes its own kind of rebellion, while the film’s compassion extends to every bond and fracture in the household. It’s a gentle, often aching drama rather than a plot-driven crowd-pleaser, but if you’re open to a humane, beautifully observed story about identity and kinship, it lingers like a memory you didn’t know you needed.

L’immensità is clearly aiming for a tender, semi-autobiographical portrait of a mother and child trying to survive a suffocating 1970s household, using imagination as a pressure valve when reality gets ugly. The problem is it often feels overstuffed—so many ideas, moods, and side textures get piled on that the emotional through-line can turn hazy, and the pacing can drift just when you want the drama to land. Penélope Cruz brings real presence and the period atmosphere is vivid, but the film can keep you at arm’s length, with harsh domestic moments that don’t always resolve into something coherent or cathartic. If you want a tightly structured, clearly articulated transgender coming-of-age story, this may frustrate you; if you’re open to a more impressionistic, memory-like family drama, it has moments that quietly hit.