Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Wonders

Monica Bellucci

Here’s Tuscany, but without the romance. The cinematography is fuzzy, the people grubby, and the work, beekeeping, demanding. No travelogue under the Tuscan sun in The Wonders, just an oddball coming-of-age tale that creates loopy magic by the end. The growing-up is owned by Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lugu), the oldest daughter in a honey-making family. As the best worker on the farm, she has a special closeness to bossy German-born patriarch Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), whose insistence on old-fashioned methods is testing the patience of his exasperated French wife Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher, from I Am Love). Gelsomina’s three younger sisters muck about the ramshackle place, in various states of wildness. (The dialogue is in Italian, but the characters have mixed Euro-origins.)

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