L'immensita 10/23 Blu-ray (Rental)

Product Description Clara (Penélope Cruz) and her emotionally distant husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) relocate to Rome to raise a family. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around marriage, desire, and gender in the early 1970s remain as traditional as ever. Their children Andrew (played by newcomer Luana Giuliani), Gino, and Diana are likewise poised at a precipice, on the verge of adolescence, with nothing but their imaginations to defuse family tensions. The eldest child, Andrew (nicknamed Adri by his parents), yearns for another life – an outsized, vibrantly-realized vision of a world where he gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Without an accepted vocabulary for talking about his transgender identity, Andrew tells adults that he’s an alien from another galaxy and makes a habit of running away to pursue a local Roma girl who accepts his boyhood at face value. As an outsider ostracized for her own eccentricities, Clara instinctively strives to protect her son despite not fully understanding him. An effortlessly moving film about growing up, fitting in, and breaking the mold, L’immensita is as freewheeling and creative as its central characters, mixing genres and staging musical numbers out of thin air. Review Everything in L'Immensita is beautiful even when everything wasn't: Crialese's odd, affecting memory piece layers the world as it was, is and could be in the same gilded frame. --Guy Lodge, Variety ....a story of quiet desperation and secret yearning in the hearts of teens and the middle-aged alike. --Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world --Sarah-Tai Black, The Los Angeles Times