The Immensity It was Emanuele Crialese’s fifth film, who everyone was following after the success of his previous works, Breath, New World y Mainland (the first one swept Cannes and the other two won awards in Venice). Among his admirers was Penelope Cruz, in love with the stories that come from Italy, in the past and in the present. For this reason, the director did not hesitate to count on her to play Clara, fascinated by her “interpretive quality and her sensitivity in showing emotions.”
LThe film gives us a portrait of Clara, but also of an entire family and a country immersed in a social transformation. The story is set in Rome in the 1970s and the script was written by six people, including Crialase and the screenwriters Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni. “It’s one of the best I’ve read,” said Penelope, “and it comes to me at the moment of maturity that the character needs.”
Adriana wants to be Andrea
Through Clara, the director focuses on different family dramas, from the marital crisis, the sexual identity of the children, and gender-based violence. Clara and her daughter share a living space, but their prisons have different bars. They are united by strength and the desire to survive in a world that has been too hostile for both of them. Adriana, the eldest of her three children, is 12 years old and feels like a boy. They want everyone to call her Andrea (in Italian, it’s a male name) and her mother opts for a middle ground: Adri. “Is what we have inside more important than what we have outside?” asks the young woman. The more Andrea distances herself from her father, an unfaithful chauvinist who is going to have a child with his secretary, the closer she gets to her mother. Clara is a mirror for her daughter, a model of femininity to imitate and a model of women, sometimes, to follow. A very special relationship is established between them, which grows stronger every day and which will be the lifeline for both of them.
Young actress Luana Giuliani plays Adriana and Filippo Pucillo plays Andrea: two voices that the director, who was born a woman and lived through his process of change in the 70s, uses to also talk about puberty, the leap into maturity, the hatred of the body that does not represent you, the desire to bring out what is hidden inside.
Actress Penelope Cruz during the filming of ‘L’ Immensità’
Raffaella Carrà, another protagonist
Music and its divas have always been a refuge from domestic violence, hatred, family machismo, and rejection. In the 1970s, when this story takes place, television was that window to another world, kinder, more human, and less strange, as María Jiménez sang in ‘The Shopping List’. Now, artists like Raffaella Carrà or Adriano Celentanowho moved her hips with the same force as the Italian singer with a Spanish soul.
They will be the escape route for Clara and her daughter, and the music, which serves to tame the beasts, here manages to reduce the dramatic intensity and horror. “When life is frustrating, we turn to movies. To a different representation of life. It is liberating. It is what I did as a child and I continue to do it. I look at another reality. Patty Pravo y Raffaella Carra “They are my mother. My mother sings and dances. My mother is happy. She is in a place where she feels comfortable. My mother never went to a psychiatric hospital. That was what scared me. The real ‘coming out’ was to free myself from my fears and portray my childhood desire: to see my mother in Raffaella Carrà’s place on TV,” he told Cine Europa.
The actress returned to Italian cinema with the role of Clara in ‘L’ Immensità’
Penelope Cruz, love for Italian cinema
The Spanish actress shot the film like a big star, with an Oscar in the long list of awards she has won. Clara is one of her last characters and culminates, for now, a successful relationship with Italian cinema that began in 2004, with Don’t move, by Sergio Castellito. With his interpretation, curiously his character is called Italy, he conquered the neighboring country and won the David di Donatello. He returned to film in Rome with Woody Allen the film To Rome with love, and another of her great roles has been in Laura Ferrari, in the film Ferrari that Michael Mann filmed in Modena. In addition, for Pedro AlmodovarPenelope Cruz has the strength and magnetism of stars like Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, and that’s how she ‘modeled’ her for her Raimunda in Return.
In The Immensity One of the most talented directors of Italian cinema and one of the best actresses on the planet came together. The result was excellent. “The first day I didn’t know how to portray Penelope, I didn’t know where to put the camera. So I put a huge lens on her, almost like a microscope, and I analyzed her to see how Penelope’s face and gaze worked. And by doing that I realized that, in her eyes, there is a mystery that cannot be explained. It’s like a gift she has, this mysterious gift of photogenicity, which was a great discovery for me. I think Penelope has something that Sofia Loren, Monica Vitti, Anna Magnani had… Something that those great divas had that cannot be explained,” said the director in an interview with RTVE.
In ‘L’ immensità’, Penélope Cruz travels back to the 70s to the rhythm of Raffaella Carrà
The soundtrack: get ready to dance
The art direction, hair, makeup and costumes did a great job of setting the mood, but it is the music that takes us back to the 70s the most. Among the songs that play on the soundtrack are: Noiseby Raffaella Carrà; Pricecolinensinainciusol, the iconic song by Adriano Celentano, covered by Mina, among other artists, and resurrected years later in the series Fargo; Love Story, by Patty Bravo; and The Immensity, que Don Backy lbrought to the San Remo Festival in 1967.
The Immensity enters the RTVE Play catalogue, where you can also enjoy other content from the actress Penélope Cruz, including the film Ma ma, shot under the direction of Julio Medem, and this interview, the most intimate of the actress. In addition, new films are coming such as
