We all know the coming-of-age story’s routine: By the end, nothing will ever be the same—but that usually only applies to the hero’s life. By the end of Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, the whole world will never be the same. Depicting a rural Italian family struggling against the merciless course of progress that will inevitably sweep their beekeeping business into obscurity, the film is seen through a young girl’s eyes, capturing a world that’s crumbling just as she’s ready to live in it.
Writer/director Rohrwacher has crafted a curiously spellbinding portrait of farm life in the Tuscan countryside. It’s wistful without sentimentality, realist but bearing a haunting dreaminess. In fact, its indelible mood and unforced attention to characters and setting most likely helped it win the Grand Jury Prize (second in esteem to the Palme d’Or) at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is the oldest of four daughters living on a farm with their parents. She’s 12 years old, but very grown up for her age, helping her father (Sam Louwyk) tend to the bees and harvest honey while serving as a domineering parent to her younger sisters. Meanwhile, Rohrwacher smartly keeps the commentary subtle: There are no big, evil corporations invading the town, nor does she indulge in long speeches about how the farmers are getting screwed. The site of conflict for her characters is simply the confluence of new technology and new regulations adding up to an insurmountable obstacle.
The family’s latest problem comes from the government, who announces that new sanitary guidelines demand regulations to the family’s honey “lab”—which is nothing more than a ramshackle room with honey machines and buckets which must be swapped out by hand so they don’t overflow. Installing washable walls, a drain and other requirements is way out of the family’s already-dire budget. And yet, as such forces threaten to close the farm, two other foreign elements invade the family’s life.
The first is a TV crew in town, filming a show called The Land of Wonders. Underlining how the area is becoming more of a novelty and tourist attraction than an actual source of production, the show promises a cash reward for the local family with the best traditional farm product and story. Similarly, Rohrwacher portrays the show as completely ridiculous. In it, everyone wears Etruscan costumes to pay tribute to the area’s heritage. As far as convincing narratives go, the show doesn’t make a whole lot of sense—it seems to have been engineered for grotesquery—but The Land of Wonders steers the film toward its strange, surrealist final sequences.
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