“L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first characteristic Movie in 11 years, and solely his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, finest identified to worldwide audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has by no means been one for unconsidered or impersonal tasks. At first look, then, one would possibly surprise what drew him out of hibernation for a movie that, with its trim runtime and small-scale home narrative, belies a title that interprets as “immensity.” This Nineteen Seventies-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender id whereas his mom battles psychological well being demons is simply too palpably pained and heartfelt to be known as slight, however it’s delicate and peculiar in ways in which really feel fragile — often splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

What provides the movie ballast, in truth, falls beneath the class of out of doors information: that for Crialese, it’s a distorted memoir of types, filtering his personal adolescent expertise by way of the attitude of a kid born biologically feminine, and craving to be another person. How oblique or summary a proxy younger Andrea (performed by charming, wild-eyed newcomer Luana Giuliani) is for the filmmaker’s younger self is for him to reply, however “L’Immensità” advantages from a disarmingly tender, honest funding within the child’s plight. The movie by no means treats transgender id as a hot-button difficulty or message-movie dais, however as a specific, private conviction in a life already beset with problems, and is extra concerned with how Andrea perceives and accepts his gender than in how the surface world resists it.

Nonetheless, at a time when the trans rights wrestle continues to be distinguished in headlines and political debate chambers, that delicacy nonetheless counts as topicality — an asset that, together with Cruz’s irresistible presence, ought to web stable distributor curiosity for this unassuming movie, each inside and past the LGBTQ bracket. The movie definitely leads with its star attraction, launched in adoring, lushly-lit closeup, as her character Clara applies pearl earrings and resplendent layers of smokey-eye make-up to a face nonetheless pink and misted with tears. If it was by way of the lens of Pedro Almodóvar that Cruz actually established herself as her era’s stand-in for Sophia Loren, Crialese takes the likeness one step additional, planting the Spaniard in Loren’s hometown of Rome, because the type of superbly wounded housewife that the Italian icon perfected within the movies of Crialese’s youth.

“You solely put on make-up should you’re going out otherwise you’ve been crying,” says Andrea — the identify he calls himself as insistently as his Household sticks along with his feminine beginning identify of Adriana, to his fixed consternation. Greater than his two youthful siblings, he sees the psychological, bodily and typically sexual abuse that Clara endures on the hand of his loveless father Felice (Vincenzo Amato); Andrea typically will get his share of it too. The household has just lately moved to a spacious house on the town fringes, however the marriage continues to be a lifeless, airless burden on each spouses; Clara begs Felice to depart her, however Catholic decorum retains them trapped collectively.

Over the course of a protracted, lazy summer season, Andrea seeks what escape he can by way of the undeveloped expanse of reeds reverse the house constructing. On the opposite aspect lies a campsite for socially maligned vacationers, the place he befriends a younger lady, Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti) who accepts him for who he’s — the one particular person in his life to take action. Clara forbids these playdates, clearly petrified of the results if Andrea’s secret emerges to hostile strangers; she humors Andrea’s assumed id greater than most, however nonetheless hasn’t the perception or understanding to deal with it as greater than a part or an aberration, a figment of a kid’s fervid creativeness that she defends as different relations tut.

Regardless of that deadlock, Andrea and Clara are allies in an prolonged household that regards them each as outsiders — the latter as a result of her Spanish origins and spiraling, reckless habits that portends an imminent nervous breakdown. Crialese underlines this bond by actually spotlighting them within the movie’s sporadic fantasy musical sequences, fever-dreamed from the variability exhibits the household watches collectively on their black-and-white tv: Snappily choreographed and shot in glistening monochrome, they place Andrea because the dashing male duet companion — typically in rockabilly leather-based, typically in suave black tie — to Clara’s siren-like chanteuse, miming to Italian pop requirements together with a tremulous translation of Francis Lai’s “Love Story” theme. 

However the advanced Freudian undertow of those gaudy diversions, they’re much less resonant and revealing than this extra mundane centerpiece scenes on this episodic movie: At household gatherings, coastal holidays, church communions and Christmas dinners, particular person crises are delivered to the fore in crowd conflicts. Andrea by no means appears extra alone than when surrounded on all sides by kin: “I come from one other galaxy,” he begins to assert, and “L’Immensità” nearly takes him at his phrase. Actually Giuliani, in a fierce efficiency attentive each to the character’s strident self-awareness and squirming bodily discomfort along with his physique and every little thing round it, has an otherworldly high quality that squares as much as Cruz’s radiance of their shared scenes, even when the movie itself often appears disproportionately besotted with the latter. “Are you able to cease being so stunning?” an exasperated Andrea pleads along with his mom at one level: The unstated reply is a convincing no.

But even perhaps the movie’s fawning star worship feels private in a movie typically beholden to the kitsch, glamorous diversions obtainable to pissed off souls in Nineteen Seventies Italy. Visually, the movie has the brightened, heightened high quality of selective reminiscence, threaded by way of the buttery lighting of DP Gergely Pohárnok’s busily populated however exactingly staged compositions and the iridescent, fresh-off-the-rack gorgeousness of Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes. The whole lot in “L’Immensità” is gorgeous even when every little thing wasn’t: Crialese’s odd, affecting reminiscence piece layers the world because it was, is and may very well be in the identical gilded body.