Penélope Cruz, an immense 'mamma', is not enough for a Crialese in a minor key

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It is not clear what it is that makes the sea immense.

The ocean shelters and gives life to an infinity of beings and it is, consequently, the condition of possibility for all of them.

Now, without all those tiny, accidental creatures, the ocean would go from nobly huge to hugely annoying.

And also wet.

's film

obviously aspires to the greatest.

Already the title is a committed declaration of principles:

It's what Italy calls what doesn't fit.

It is about portraying the sea from its condition of absolute, disproportionate, mother (and father) of all.

It is not so much the size that matters as the other, which is even greater and deeper.

And yet, by dint of forgetting to build the characters that inhabit it in depth and with meaning, the film ends up with just the opposite: an accidental and bumpy ride through

but generally without a soul, without an ocean to dive into.

All intentions are good.

And the first of them, more than a simple intention, is the miracle of always.

She is the mother.

And she is in the radical sense of her, that she is Italian (although she plays a Spanish).

The idea is to build with fragments of a memory that belongs to everyone the past of a family of those that time has precisely called traditional.

Things of nostalgia with

singing

But be careful, monsters live behind the dream of longing.

To put it in hasty terms, what emerges (or, better, wants to emerge) is the perfect description of what is called patriarchy.

The father goes about his business with his bonhomie as a rancid seducer.

Beside him, each of the three children in turn drags a trauma between incomprehension and humiliation.

The eldest wants to be truly the eldest.

And in her misunderstood and harassed adolescence she falls in love, against the rules of

black and white '

The one in the middle decides to react to the family situation by boycotting himself and defecating in the middle of the house.

And the little girl just refuses to eat.

In this environment, the mother, the character of Penélope Cruz,

And, actually, for knowing how to be her.

That she also counts.

The agility and illuminated transparency with which Crialese poses the staging lights up the screen in every detail.

The director of such radically unique films, despite their irregularities, such as

and '

', devotes himself to the almost tactile construction of the environment, to the roughness of each memory.

But, against all odds, he neglects the rest.

The characters, with hardly any nuances, navigate the screen, apparently lost and without advancing in a dramatic development that is declared almost non-existent.

Again, as is becoming a rule, she is the actress who last year received the Volpi Cup right here for

' the one in charge of enduring everything, of filling the look with nuances, of rising far above what the script tells her.

The director says that this film is the project he has always longed for;

he adds that

due to its personal and even autobiographical nature, has always been his next work.

Always postponed.

And in his statement one can read perhaps the fate of those actors who by dint of rehearsing and rehearsing end up losing their strength on stage.

Beside her, Penélope Cruz confesses that she has already given life to enough mothers to be considered a '

', which is the highest category of all of them.

She also says that there is nothing more intriguing than what happens inside a family.

And she adds already with the statement put into her current character: "Clara [her character] represents many realities of today, there are many women in the world trapped in their own homes pretending to their children that

And we believe it.

For the end there is a somewhat depopulated sea and a creature, as well as an actress, immense in her oceanic solitude.

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• Penelope Cruz

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