L’Immensità review – desperation and secret yearning in 1970s Rome

Emanuele Crialese’s drama of family dysfunction, starring Penélope Cruz, offers moments of glorious escapist fantasy

Emanuele Crialese’s film is a drama of family dysfunction and multi-generational unhappiness: a story of quiet desperation and secret yearning in the hearts of teens and the middle-aged alike. Hollywood might set something like this in the ’burbs. Crialese places it right in the centre of racy and prosperous Rome in 1970.

L’Immensità and its characters are reaching for something: some release, some consolatory epiphany, some immense personal revelation. And the gestures the film gives us along the way are intriguing, especially the glorious pop-choreography escapist fantasy sequences which are on a higher level of inspiration than anything else here. I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.