Recensioni de* critic*

The Wonders, about a family of rural Tuscan beekeepers dragged toward a modern urban mentality, is a throwback to different kind of filmmaking: smaller, more emotionally intense, more tactile. It's also a film in which not much "happens" in the sense that hack screenwriting books keep advising.

Rohrwacher has a deft way of sidling into moments of drama, aided by DP Helene Louvart's extraordinary work, which gives actors room to breathe and images a sense of living color (shot in 16mm). Gelsomina's inchoate understanding that she needs something more dovetails with the sense that her father's business methods are running to the end of their shelf life, though he's capable of a defiant fantastical gesture in the film's increasingly dreamy final third.

Propelled by giddy mood swings, The Wonders weaves all this crisis into the choppy daily rhythms of a family struggling to navigate the tension between continuity and change. Rohrwacher handles her material with a richly detailed naturalism and a keen eye for the risks posed by Wolfgang's Promethean grandstanding to his children.

Ms. Rohrwacher's strengths here are the tender intimacy of the performances, particularly those of the older child actors, and her gentle meandering, both narrative and cinematographic.

Director Alice Rohrwacher's movie, which took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014, takes a long while to pick up steam, but its tactile feel for the dirt and labor of a farm, and tender regard for the young protagonist, are immensely endearing.

Rohrwacher treats the material with a playfulness not too far away from that of Roy Andersson or perhaps even Fellini, and displays a keenness for revealing the petty rivalries and jealousies and growing pains of familial relations.

When the family gets a chance to participate in a reality-TV competition showcasing the products of local farmers, Gelsomina begs her father, a taciturn loner, to consent. What happens is less significant than how it happens: The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.

Much of the film's power comes from its embrace of the ambiguous – specifically with regard to time: this story could've occurred at any point in the past 50 years... In perfect harmony with itself, the film retains a documentary feel without resorting to heavy-handed vérité aesthetics. Even after multiple viewings, The Wonders remains a sumptuous, tender portrait of an era that we might already, unknowingly, have passed beyond.

For a country with such a rich cinematic heritage, Italy's recent track record as far as championing emerging talent is concerned, especially of the female variety, is hardly what you might call exemplary. To that end, the continued rise of the Rohrwacher sisters comes as both a welcome tonic and the surest sign yet that the long-term future of Italian cinema is in good health.

There's so much here to remind you of the Italian neorealist pictures, particularly in Rohrwacher's brilliant deployment of her mostly young and inexperienced cast, but it also shares an underlying magic with Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro, the great Studio Ghibli animations about children whose rural lives have a quiet profundity that transcends incident or plot.

The Wonders indeed has moments of small wonder, with an unassuming, rarefied beauty of life living on the edge... The film has a loose structure, its raw, documentary-style realism sometimes interrupted by dreamlike episodes (during which Monica Bellucci appears), and yet it grows into a touching portrait of pastoral existence and an honest coming-of-age tale.

Without delving into heavy-handed themes, Alice Rohrwacher makes a very interesting parallel between the children and bees. Like children, bees vanish and change their location. It is their nature to do so. Families also move elsewhere and are deeply affected by time... The fissures in time, memory and people are unavoidable. But families, just like bees, disaffected by the outside world, continue to live their life anyway.