Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders will have its North American premiere at the upcoming New York Film Festival. Like Rohrwacher's debut feature Corpo Celeste (NYFF 2011), her follow-up—the winner of this year's Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix—was inspired by the director’s upbringing in the countryside in Italy's Umbria, Lazio, and Tuscany regions. It follows a German-Italian family of beekeepers, focusing on the oldest daughter Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), a12-year-old who is being groomed as heir to the family business.
The tone hovers between dream and reality with a Dardennes-inspired lensing, impressionistic sequences that capture the development of a nearly adolescent girl, and a sense of people out of step with the world. One day while Gelsomina and her sisters play in the sea, they find a camera crew making an ad for the television program Countryside Wonders, a talent show that’s hunting for the area’s “most traditional family.” Although ostensibly tacky, the dressed up vision of the hostess (Monica Bellucci) in an insane white head dress hovering over the salt flats like a fairy godmother has a profound effect on Gelsomina who sees this as the way to solve their family's money troubles and decides to participate against her father's wishes.
Visuals are in a similar style as Corpo Celeste. Both films were shot by French cinematographer by Hélène Louvart in a neorealist manner giving a look that doesn't hide the ugliness of peasant life with its mud and cloudy skies.
The Wonders | Clip | NYFF52
NYFF Official Description
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s follow-up to Corpo Celeste (NYFF 2011) is a vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion that revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father (Sam Louwyck), Italian mother (Alba Rohrwacher), four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). The film never announces its themes but has plenty on its mind, not least the ways in which old traditions survive in the modern world, as acts of resistance or repackaged as commodities. Combining a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery, The Wonders conjures a richly concrete world that is nonetheless subject to the magical thinking of adolescence.
