It’s tempting to compare Emanuele Crialese, the award-winning director of Terraferma and Respiro, with Donna Tartt, the famously infrequent author whose three celebrated novels have each been published a decade apart.
L’Immensità, co-written by Francesca Manieri, Vittorio Moroni and the director, is Crialese’s first film in 11 years, and it’s as considered and heartfelt as that hiatus suggests. An autobiographical drama concerning a transgender preteen, Adri , it is set in 1970s Rome, many years before gender recognition became a battleground – “You and Dad made me wrong,” 12-year-old Adri tells his sparky, vulnerable mother, Clara .
The immensity of the title refers to all the complications of growing up, struggles that are compounded by Adri’s wrestling with gender identity, his mother’s precarious mental health, and the disintegration of Clara’s marriage to Adri’s philandering, abusive father, Felice . The playful Clara has few rules, save for forbidding Adri and his younger siblings, Gino and Diana , to cross through the reeds near their apartment, a thicket that leads to the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Naturally, the children waste little time in journeying to the shanty town beyond the shrubbery, where Andri finds puppy love with the teenaged Sara .