The Wonders

Description

The simple life isn’t easy to find these days and it’s harder still to maintain. In many areas where isolation and physical labor have long been taken for granted, a world of other options is now just a mouse-click away. How to keep restless kids focused on daily farm toil when their friends in town have no such responsibilities, and living off the land seems not just burdensome but anachronistic? That’s the essence of the push-pull dynamic at work in the family that Alice Rohrwacher’s second feature observes. Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) and Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher) have chosen a back-to-the-land lifestyle in the central Italian countryside. But as this driven, beekeeping patriarch becomes an ever-more-humorless taskmaster, his wife grows less and less convinced that nonstop labor, financial worry and deprivation is what she wants for herself—let alone for their four young daughters. When their eldest, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu,) becomes fixated on entering a glitzy reality-show contest, that conflict escalates. As in the writer-director’s acclaimed 2011 Corpo Celeste, Rohrwacher is deftly attuned to the small rebellions and inquisitiveness of early female adolescence. This autobiographically influenced Cannes Grand Prix winner balances humor and drama in a casual flow, where even the most absurd occurrences—notably those involving Monica Bellucci as a TV-hostess glamazon—take on a bemusedly everyday quality. —Dennis Harvey

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