Alice Rohrwacher, director of the much admired first feature Corpo Celeste, has come to Cannes with a gentle, humorous, and sweet-natured coming-of-age story. It is a light and diverting piece work set in the northern Italian countryside: there is charm, though it is a little sentimental and undemanding, without the real emotional power that many were expecting from Rohrbacher. It is rather too dependent on the clichéd plot device of winning a TV competition.
Perhaps the "wonders" of the title refer to the natural unheralded miracles that occur in every family when children grow to adolescence and start to become adults independent of their mum and dad.
Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is a girl in her early teens who is the eldest of four daughters - kids who have to work hard helping out in the chaotic, ramshackle smallholding whose main business is the production of honey. Gelsomina must help her grumpy dad (Sam Louwyck) with the hives and with the lab production indoors. A centrifuge spins the honey down to the correct consistency. It is then decanted into plastic buckets, then into jars. The children are always terrified about what might happen if they forget to change the bucket and the honey spills all over the floor - a disaster that the audience is naturally expecting.
Gelsomina is growing up. She is starting to look like the most responsible person in the whole family. She's the one who worries about colony collapse disorder killing the bees and also the ill effects of the neighbouring farm's vermin killer.
One scene shows how she can't join in the family's raucous swimming session - thoughtful, self-conscious, she hangs back, aware that there is something else she should be doing, some other more grownup way of behaving. Later, when she is stung on the eyelid by a bee, Gelsomina is mortified by her appearance, though naturally can't confide the exact reason to her sisters.
Two extraordinary things happen. The police and child service agency offer the family money to look after a 14-year-old offender who has been ordered into a family rehab programme. But he is boy - and might wreak havoc with the impressionable girls.
The other bizarre event is that the family are offered the chance to compete in a wacky TV competition set up for local farmers to win prizes for the best produce - and all in hokey traditional "Etruscan" costume of the locality. Gelsomina is dazzled by the beautiful actress who presents the show - a stately cameo for Monica Bellucci.
The competition itself is engagingly surreal and there are other startling touches: the farmer promises to get his girls a camel. Does he mean a toy camel? No. Gelsomina's younger sister Marinella asks her mum plaintively: "When I'm 60 will you be dead?" "Yes," she replies briskly "... now get on with peeling the tomatoes."
This is an entertaining, affecting piece of work - but not wonderful.
