“Penélope is the archetype of the ideal woman”.

Italian director Emanuele Crialese presents L’immensitá, a family melodrama starring Penélope Cruz and based on her own childhood that will be screened out of competition

“Penélope is the archetype of the ideal woman”. This is how blunt Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese has been when referring to Penélope Cruz, the star of his latest film, L’immensitá, a family melodrama that traces the identity and condition of women set in Rome in the 1970s based on Crialese’s own childhood and which is being shown out of competition.

The film tells the story of Clara (Penélope Cruz) and Felice (Vicenzo Amato), a married couple who have just moved into a new flat. Their relationship is over: they no longer love each other, but they are unable to separate. The only thing that keeps them together is their children, on whom Clara pours her desire for freedom. Adriana (Luana Giuliani), the eldest, has just turned 12 and rejects her name and identity, wants to convince everyone that she is a boy, and her obstinacy brings the already fragile family balance to breaking point.

“We need our memory to guide us in the present”, Crialese defended at the press conference, who compared his life journey to a photographic album “that the time had come to open”. However, L’immensitá is not a biographical film in a pure sense. “I am not a lover of reality, but of truth”, said the director, who acknowledged that there are numerous “inventions” in the film. “It is not a chronicle of a life remembered, but rather the presentation, somewhat imaginative and dramatic, of everything that remained with me and that I needed to tell,” he explained.

Crialese detailed the process of finding the actress who plays Adriana. “I found her on a motorbike circuit”, recalled the filmmaker, who emphasised that the impetus with which she wanted to beat her rivals in the races, almost all of whom were men, was decisive in the drive she transferred to the character.

A film with a carefully designed visual and sound design, the setting of the flat where the events take place is a replica of the house where Crialese himself grew up, who, together with the director of photography and production, devised a nostalgic space in which colours, shapes and sensations converge, with the omnipresence of the music of Raffaella Carrà and Patty Pravo, “the two sides of the same coin”: the former familiar and fun, the latter sensual and mysterious. As an anecdote from the filming, he recalled that he and Penélope Cruz suggested that the actress should meet Carrà, but when they asked the film’s producer about it, he told them that she had died just an hour before.

L’immensitá arrives in Spanish cinemas next Friday 28th.