I am not sure when was the last time I had become aware of an audience not only rejecting what they were seeing—which they normally receive quietly, for either lethargy or respect—but also making their dissent understood like in the old ballistic days of rotten eggs and tomatoes. If a few viewers giving up on Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All in a full house of three hundred seats and a film on a relatively disturbing subject hadn’t quite prompted that consideration, they did in the much smaller context of a random midweek show at the Crouch End Arthouse, populated by hardly a dozen desperate souls. Thinking of it in retrospect, L’immensità is not so unbearable to make people flee, but it does put to the test the most committed filmgoers’ stamina.
Whereas a storyteller rummaging into his past is traditionally a good premise—in cinema as in any of the arts—Emanuele Crialese struggles to find his way through the same maze of intimate recollections that other directors have been able to articulate or make somehow attractive. The exploratory spirit of the artist looking for his own self in fragments of dreams and memories is the main absence. The narrative is tangent to many intriguing characters, stories, themes, without ever daring into the depths of any. The scenes inspired by Raffaella Carrà and Adriano Celentano are per se as brilliant as the sparse intuitions L’immensità is paced by, but so poorly grounded to ultimately come through just as lyrical indulgences. Even the Seventies are depicted in a rather superficial way, mostly relying on ochre and amber tones, some beautiful garments, and a couple of cars of the time scattered around a derelict city of concrete. None of this is necessarily bad, it just feels tentative and slightly disjointed like everything else in the film. I always thought I didn’t mind a film that doesn’t seem to know which way to go. And yet, sometimes, it turns out I do.
