by Christine Westwood
There’s a fabulous scene in the early part of L’Immensita when mum Clara (Penelope Cruz) leads her three kids in a wild dance as they set the table for dinner. The mise-en-scene is all brightness and primary colours. In contrast, the scenes of Clara with her husband are somber, with a dark muted palette in cavernous rooms.
L’Immensita is the latest and most deeply autobiographical work by Italian director and writer Emanuele Crialese (Golden Door, Respiro), with co-writers Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni. The styling is gorgeous and there are some fun fantasy sequences. The film perhaps tries to cover too much ground and too many social and family issues, though the actors hold this sometimes loose jumble together, especially Cruz as the vibrant but troubled mother.
This visual division between bright childhood and burdened adulthood is carried throughout the whole movie. The motif of being caught between two worlds is perfect for the main character’s dilemma. Clara’s oldest child is Adriana (Luana Giuliani), who wants to be Andrew. Dad Felice (Vincenzo Amato) is angry about it. He’s angry about a lot of things, taking it out on his wife with physical abuse, not to mention unapologetic philandering. In fact, there’s quite a bit of slapping going on in this film, as set in the 1970s. It’s an LGBTQIA coming of age story, but also about the disturbing misery of growing up in a disrupted family.
Clara is Adriana/Andrew’s ally. They meet on that child/adult threshold because Clara is wildly playful in comparison with other adults and eventually diagnosed with mental problems. The film doesn’t spell it out, but the patriarchal system is very much in charge, with hysterical wives and transgender kids well controlled.
Of course, Cruz is totally convincing as a female off the leash. Yelling in the street, turning a garden hose on the kids with gleeful abandon and no hesitation, her sophisticated looks easily and convincingly kick into feral mode. Her Oscar winning role as Maria Elena in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona was a terrific demonstration of her strength and rawness, while her catalogue of films with Pedro Almodovar has characters flouting every sort of social boundary.
Troubled, even unhinged, mothers, have been a theme for Cruz, who throughout her career has used her startling beauty and strong dancer’s body to embody female archetypes while questioning and subverting them.
Born in 1974, Cruz grew up outside Madrid, where she studied ballet for 9 years at the Spanish National Conservatory. She is quoted as saying that ballet instilled discipline that proved important in her acting career. With 4 years of theatre training at the Cristina Rota school, she was famously inspired to act when she saw Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down by Pedro Almodovar, the director she would later collaborate with on 8 movies.
Her precocious ambition got her an agent by the time she was 15. She made her acting debut on television at 16, and was cast in her first feature film the year after. In Jamon Jamon (1992), director Bigas Luna cast Cruz as a pregnant teenager whose ex-prostitute mother tries to marry her off to aspiring bullfighter Raul, then falls for the man herself. Raul was played by Javier Bardem, who was to marry Cruz 18 years later.
Bardem starred in Cruz’s first Almodovar film, Live Flesh (1997). She is a young prostitute who gives birth to a son on a bus in the opening scenes. The theme continues in All About My Mother where Cruz is striking and fearless in her role of Rosa, a young nun who works in a shelter for sex workers and who is pregnant and HIV positive herself. If you can tackle these roles, you can do just about anything.
She hit the Hollywood screen running with Hi-Lo Country (1998), quickly followed by Woman on Top (2000) and starring opposite Matt Damon in Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses the same year. 2001 saw her alongside Johnny Depp in Blow and an on and off screen romance with Tom Cruise in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky.
Cruz returned to Spain and Almodovar to play Raimunda in his critically acclaimed Volver (2004), which follows unhappily married mother Raimunda’s journey back to her ancestral village to attend her aunt’s funeral. Her mother’s ghost turns up as she negotiates a needy sisterhood, funerals, incest and murder. Cruz received an Oscar nomination and a New York Times review praised her for being ‘earthy, unpretentious and a little vulgar without shedding an ounce of her natural glamour’.
Her first Oscar win, for Best Supporting Actress, came in 2008 with Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She plays Maria Elena, artist and psychotic ex-wife of Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Bardem again), turning up at his home to disrupt the fun with his new lovers, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson. Cruz makes an unlikely plot, along with murderous intentions and loose sexual boundaries, believable with her total commitment and that ‘feral woman’ on display again. She was the first Spanish actress to score the Academy Award.
After the win, Cruz played in Pirates of the Caribbean, the musical Nine, comedy satire Zoolander 2 and was part of the star-studded cast of Murder Onn the Orient Express (2017). She co-starred with Bardem again that year, playing journalist Virginia Vallejo in Loving Pablo.
In her 40s, Cruz keeps getting stronger and even more assured. A standout role was her turn as Donatello Versace in the TV series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (2018).
After working with Almodovar again in Pain and Glory (2019), she followed up with his Parallel Mothers (2021) which gained her an Oscar nomination for her emotional role as photographer and mother Janis. Also in 2021, she starred with Oscar Martinez and Antonio Banderas in the fabulously deranged Official Competition, a satire about the making of a movie. She is the genius director, aggressively gay, with sharp suits and bigger than big hair, a cartoon silhouette who pushes her two leading men past their limits.
As mentioned, Cruz is the only Spanish actress to win an Oscar. She is also the only one to have a star on Hollywood Boulevard. The last word should go to her long time collaborator and original inspiration, Almodovar. In an email interview with the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan last year, he wrote: Penélope is very sensitive to social injustice and to increasing poverty levels, especially for children. She takes a very active role in various non-profit organizations; she herself runs some initiatives to which she enlists many of her key friends.
As far as her film craft goes he added: Penelope has a blind faith in me. She is convinced that I am a better director and writer than I really am. This fills me with the confidence to request anything of her, while the trust she deposits in me allows her to do things during filming that she might not dare try with other directors.
