‘Where is here?’: Place and rurality through the cinematic child

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which Alice Rohrwacher’s Le maraviglie, as exemplary of a growing tendency within contemporary cinema, negotiates ideas of place and belonging through the trope of the rural child. It contends that the cinematic child in the film articulates a dynamic and open – rather than static, localized and fixed – understanding of place. Against the Romantic tendency to associate childhood and nature as a way of grounding essentialist ideas of place, the film draws on children’s heightened openness to the others in order to embody what Doreen Massey calls a global sense of place (1991): a sense of place built upon the social relations created in the encounter with the other. By bringing together film analysis, childhood studies and theorizations of place, this article builds an interdisciplinary approach to look into this shifting use of the child figure. It first explores two different reactions to the threats of the global presented in the film – the family’s mode of living and the reality TV show contest – as reterritorializing attempts to ground a sense of place in the local. It then argues that, in the way in which the child protagonist bonds with a newcomer to the farm, she rejects both these notions and opens herself up to alternative understandings of place. In a gradual recovery of her childhood that culminates in the last scene of the film, she comes to embody a progressive sense of place that emphasizes the hybrid nature of global places.