The season of wonders

“Gelsomina! Gelsomina! Come here!” Over and over, in The Wonders, the father calls Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). At times his call, almost a refrain, can sound like a reprimand. His oldest daughter helps him with his work and acts as a mother to her younger sisters. The father is a beekeeper and his shouts come from another era, which is no longer his daughter’s. He calls her, as if to stop her from daydreaming or, in some way, prevent Gelsomina from growing up, but he does so in vain. Maria Alexandra Lungu is striking in the way she represents this girl-woman’s fascination for the unknown, in the first moment that Gelsomina and her sisters see Milly Catena (Monica Belucci), television presenter and the host of a reality show about local traditions. Gelsomina’s gaze, when faced by Milly, shows that her father’s shout is powerless against the onward march of time and maturity. It is a gaze that comes out of a mystery: confused, bewitched, inquisitive and enticed.

It is the wonders, more than the illusions, of adult life that seem to inspire Gelsomina. Her future as a woman meets its match from the distant city, arriving to her region with a television crew and, more than that, the very idea of television and of the city, which this crew so extravagantly brings to the countryside. Adulthood is bound to the city, puberty to the country. That’s why, for Gelsomina, participating in the television show represents leaving her comfort zone and taking a step into the unknown, into her future.

In The Wonders, television heralds neither degeneration nor corruption of the spirit. Rather, it acts as the other side of the mirror through which girlhood is a remote village, somewhere in Tuscany, Italy, and adulthood, effervescent and mysterious, is a bee sting. It is indeed relevant that the family keeps bees, since honey and stings, danger and delight, and the delight of danger, here represent the tempting wonders of the distant city. Gelsomina knows how to domesticate the bees, we understand from the start. But will she know, both her and her family, how to avoid getting stung? Suddenly, this becomes not so much about protecting ourselves from poison and predators, but moving towards them, allowing ourselves, intentionally, to be seduced by something we know may hurt us.

The Wonders uses the fields and the city as symbols for an investigation into bodily and spiritual transformations over the passing of time. Gelsomina is not a naïve figure; rather, she is almost a woman. As much as her father still calls her, the daughter (that he used to know) no longer comes, since, once stung, Gelsomina the ‘good girl’ no longer exists. This is why the father’s fractious call in the opening scenes is so important. Gelsomina’s name remains, but the person it refers to, its meaning, transforms over the course of The Wonders. On calling his daughter, the father calls a different daughter, because Alice Rohrwacher has already filmed her transfiguration: The Wonders reveals to us that rarely seen thing, the season in which a girl transforms into a woman.