“The law? Who’s going to find out here?” Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) contemplates a transgression that his eldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), reminds him is illegal. In the mildly engaging, mostly naturalistic coming-of-age drama The Wonders, this crime is no greater than that of buying a camel.
Wolfgang is right; nobody would find out. He is the head of a family of beekeepers who live in the remote Umbrian countryside, barely touched by modernity. Wolfgang and his youngest girls like to walk around in nothing but their underwear, free spirits not of some hippie ideal but of a centuries old connection to the land. The family has a car and a television and makes their honey with the help of a motorized centrifuge, but they spend most of their long hard days working the land, chasing down bees and collecting honeycombs. While all his girls help with the honey in some way, 12-year old Gelsomina is the family’s second-in command.
As isolated as they are, the modern world noses its way in and threatens the family with regulations and potential riches. When Wolfgang takes his girls to the area beach, their screams disturb a television crew looking for the region’s Most Traditional Family for the Countryside Wonders competition. Their figurehead is Milly Catena (Monica Belluci), decked in a white headdress and flowing gown. With a condescending air, she stumbles over her script; instead of calling the residents of the unspoiled region living in “once-upon-a-time,” she calls it “prehistoric time.”
Dad is suspicious of these outsiders, as he is of everything, but Gelsomina is intrigued, not just by the television crew, but by a troubled teen (Luis Huilca) that the family takes in. But Wolfgang’s reservations may not be unfounded; soon the honey farm is ordered to bring their operations up to code or else.
Writer-director Alice Rohrwacher has a gentle, unassuming touch through most of the film, quietly observing the beekeepers’ hard work and pre-modern lifestyle without condescension, and her leads are effectively natural. Lungu’s restrained Gelsomina grounds a family that is sometimes threatened by their father’s volatility. Louwyck makes Wolfgang human without turning him into a lovable kook. But the film’s strength is also its weakness. The family’s gentle lifestyle doesn’t seem as threatened by the modern world as it is by Wolfgang’s hot temper.
The film’s cinematic tension is Rossellini neorealism rubbing up against Felliniesque spectacle, but the central image (and one highlighted on the poster) is out of The Innocents: an insect with a stinger crawling out of a child’s mouth. In another context, it would be a symbol of corrupted innocence, but as Gelsomina comes from an old tradition, the bee that emerges from her changing body seems more like a symbol of defiance.
As the Countryside Wonders competition takes over the film, its palette takes on richer, more saturated colors, getting faker as a television crew tries to approximate the life of the Etruscans. The Wonders seems to be about authenticity and being true to your self and to your heritage, but there’s also a lesson in the hard work that goes behind making honey: something so delicious can have a lot of blood and bitterness behind it. The film may have won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but it could have used a little more blood and bitterness.