‘L’immensità’ Review: Roman Holiday

Penélope Cruz is a vision of tragic beauty when she first appears in the Italian period drama “L’immensità.” The camera captures her in adoring close-up as it grazes over her eyes, traced with black eyeliner and wet with tears. Her character, Clara, is an ordinary upper middle-class mother of three, but in the mind of her eldest, Andrew (Luana Giuliani), she’s a goddess akin to the nation’s great stars, like Monica Vitti or Sophia Loren.

Loosely based on the director Emanuele Crialese’s transition, “L’immensità” is a sun-dappled nostalgia trip marked by young Andrew’s hot temper and robust inner fantasy life. He was assigned female at birth, but he knows — despite resistance from his emotionally distant father (Vincenzo Amato), his siblings and his extended family — that he is a man.

1970s Rome is no easy place for a transgender person, and though Andrew isn’t outright persecuted, his struggles are ignored or trivialized. Clara, a housewife stuck in a deadbeat marriage, understands the feeling all too well.

Unremarkable, naturalistic scenes of youthful adventuring fill out the coming-of-age drama. Andrew takes his younger siblings on excursions through the patch of wild reeds that separate their handsome neighborhood from working-class encampments, eventually striking up a romance with a local girl unaware of — or completely indifferent to — the nature of his identity.

More striking are the Oedipal tensions that flare up between Clara and Andrew. He stands up to his father who forces himself on Clara, as he does the creeps who sexually harass her on the streets. In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.

L’immensità
Not rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.