Similar Stories to “wonders” Gives A Spiritual Glow To Tale Of A Family on Bing News

By Walter Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle Movies
Wed, 11/25/2015 - 9:55pm

The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s latest film, “The Wonders,” is an exceptional tale of family dynamics and a fading way of life, grounded with a sense of physicality and the primacy of nature that eventually takes on spiritual overtones. The central figure is 12-year-old Gelsomina (a clear nod to the sweet-natured heroine of Fellini’s “La Strada”), one of four daughters of a German beekeeper and his Italian wife, eking out a living in rural Tuscany. The father, Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), is a cranky sort, but his wife (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister), along with Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) and the other children, are capable of holding their own. [...] the family encounters a crew filming a commercial for a reality TV show called “The Wonders,” the star of which is portrayed by none other than Monica Bellucci — pretty wonderful herself — garbed as a cheesily surreal goddess. There’s surely some autobiographical strain here — the director’s father was a German beekeeper married to an Italian woman — but for whatever reason, it’s clear that Rohrwacher deeply admires Gelsomina, and is enchanted with her sisters. The filmmaker’s sense of kinship with girls was evident in her previous feature “Corpo Celeste,” which played here in 2012. The movie, which won the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes festival, has some modest weaknesses — not enough is done with the German boy, and the family has a female boarder whose unexplained presence raises questions, and not positive ones.

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