In a turbulent if confusing film year containing a host of mixed messages, Italy may just show the way with a female-charged farm comedy that might possibly cop the big prize, a Best Foreign Language Oscar. A sleeper hit at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders, an Italian-Swiss-German co-production, recalls comic gems from the 1950s and 60s, a golden age of Italian film comedy, the era of Antonioni and Fellini. Only this time, the film comes with a perky coming-of-age story involving a 12-year-old beekeeper's daughter.
Fighting eldest daughter Gelsomina (a vivacious turn from newcomer Maria Alexandra Lungu) for command of the hives and the hearts of espresso-chugging filmgoers is a balding, hyper-macho Italian farmer, Wolfgang. Sam Louwyck imbues this sputtering would-be domestic tyrant with a hyper-comic charm reminiscent of Roberto Benigni. Wolfgang, a struggling tenant farmer whose landlord is threatening his bees with toxic pesticides, wants nothing more than to be his country's prize-winning beekeeper. But life, the untamable nature of his pesky little insects, and the ideals, curiosity and TV viewing habits of Gelsomina keep getting in the way. In an early scene, Wolfgang tries recruiting Gelsomina to his project by dangling an old childhood fantasy in front of her.
Wolfgang: "If you work plenty, we'll buy you a present, a camel. You used to want one."
Gelsomina: "Yes, when I was a child. And, by the way, it's against the law."
Wolfgang: "The law? Bullshit! Who's gonna ever find it here?"
The family, whose entire beekeeping operation doesn't really meet Italy's new farm-production sanitation codes, experiences a flirting-with-disaster meltdown moment when a year's supply of honey winds up all over the barn floor just before the inspector arrives with his checklist. Next, an old buddy shows up to taunt Wolfgang over his inability to produce anything but female offspring. The solution to his boyless universe arrives when an urban social worker gives him the responsibility for raising a troubled German-speaking teen, but the strings attached to the boy's stay pose additional problems.
Director Rohrwacher, having positioned her little family agro-farce against a stunningly lovely piece of Tuscan landscape, subtly stacks the deck against their surviving a truly sticky predicament. Besides bamboozling the health inspector, the family's salvation lies in successfully competing in a wacky TV show hosted by a shimmering white-gowned personality (Monica Belluci). The hostess' look provides the impressionable Gelsomina with dreams of a whole new career path, but this may come only over her furious dad's dead body.
Gelsomina: "If we take part �""
Wolfgang: "In what?"
Gelsomina: "In the selection, 'The Land of Wonders.'"
Wolfgang: "Like we need that bullshit!"
All through The Wonders I recalled how my first taste of farm-fresh produce (they didn't call it organic in the 1950s) came from my maternal granddad's field of freshly grown radishes. Thirty-three-year-old Tuscan native Rohrwacher here gives lovers of naturalistic big-screen storytelling the good news that what you savor is available for at least a week, beginning tomorrow, at Bay Area Landmark Theatres.