Remember when presidential candidate Donald Trump was genuinely sympathetic to trans people? I don’t. Regardless of whatever efforts he made to seem reasonable on this issue as a candidate, once he had the title of president, all bets were off.
On Day One of his maladministration, Trump set the tone by ordering all mentions of LGBTQ people removed from the White House website. Given the long list of bad things Trump followed that up with, ordering the execution of all trans people on Day One of his dictatorship would be a logical continuation. Or maybe he’d order the execution of all Latinos first. Or at least the ones that don’t work picking tomatoes for Heinz ketchup.
Trump’s hatred of trans people, almost as virulent as his hatred of Latinos, has allowed other people’s hatred of trans people to surface and add to the dangers that already menace them.
That’s the climate that prompted Italian director Emanuele Crialese, born Emanuela, to make the very personal L’Immensita, starring Luana Giuliani and Penélope Cruz.
Andrea (Giuliani) is a young boy who was born female (note that Andrea is pronounced “An-dreh-ah” not “An-dree-ah”). His mother, Clara (Cruz), and father (Vincenzo Amato) named him Adriana. Although Clara allows Andrea to dress in boy’s clothes and indulges his fantasy that he’s actually an extraterrestrial, she does nothing to get him medical gender-affirming care. And the father is much more concerned that Andrea is making the family look bad by his refusal to conform to gender norms for his birth gender.
Andrea rigs up a pentagram on the roof of the apartment building he lives in, hoping to communicate with his home planet. When that doesn’t work, he tries something more terrestrial: he eats a whole bunch of communion wafers. But since that bread hasn’t been transubstantiated, eating all those wafers doesn’t work either. Or maybe transubstantiation wouldn’t help matters regardless.
The family live in an apartment building. There’s a workers’ camp nearby which Andrea and the other children go play in from time. There Andrea meets Sara (Penélope Nieto Conti), she accepts him as he is, not as other people think he should be.
Sara’s a refreshing contrast to the boy who has a crush on Andrea. That boy thinks Andrea should wear girl’s clothes and he and Andrea should go steady. But at least he doesn’t insist on it to the menacing extent a couple of random men chase Clara after she and Andrea go the beauty salon. Andrea tries to stand up to the boorish men. Clearly those men are not the kind of man that Andrea wants to grow up to be.
Some movie critics have remarked that Penélope Cruz is playing the same character in this movie that she has played in many other movies; a cheerful free spirit who occasionally lets on that underneath she’s intensely sad. But I guess that unlike professional movie critics I have seen a much smaller selection of her movies.
This movie’s described as autobiographical in several reviews. But like The Inspection (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago), the protagonist in L'immensità does not have the same name as the writer-director. But just as with The Inspection, I get the feeling that the mother character in L'immensità is an accurate portrayal of the writer-director’s mother.
At first this movie feels like one of those French movies in which things just randomly happen, and no scene feels particularly motivated by any prior scene. But if you stick with this movie to the end, I think you will find that it leads to a teary, heartfelt ending.
I rate this movie ★★★★☆ plus a half star. The DVD technically has special features, but it’s just the movie trailer and a lame photo gallery, so I give the DVD ★★★☆☆.
The Region 1 DVD for L’Immensita is in Italian (and occasional Spanish) with English subtitles. The movie runs 99 minutes.
L’Immensita has not been rated by the MPA. I think PG would be appropriate, “for suggestive references and brief language,” though I suspect the MPA would overreact with R (though maybe they would have enough sense not to slap NC-17 on this one).