Set to the rhythm of the changing seasons in the high Italian Alps, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is a graceful, sometimes amusing but rarely emotional second feature; it is focused on a young couple in love, whose relationship ends in tragedy. Its bow in Venice competition should considerably raise the profile of the director, whose prize-winning first feature film Maternal (2020), about a rebellious teenage mother living in a women’s refuge run by nuns, has unexpected echoes in the new film.
It was the late Catholic director Ermanno Olmi who opened a film school in northern Italy and whose own films examined the hardships and injustice of peasant life in the past. The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) launched a new style of realism that combined respect for simple folk living with their ancestral traditions and fervent religious beliefs. Vermiglio, with its tender love story of two young innocents longing to be joined in matrimony, and its later problematic related to a mother and her baby, fall naturally into this framework. Delpero’s story slips away from the model mainly in its de-emphasis of religious belief, and its focus on the aspects of social change affecting women at the end of the Second World War.
The time is 1944, when young men were away in uniform fighting and only womenfolk, children and a few elderly men were left to carry on the farmwork and homesteads. It is a land cut off from the world. The snowy mountains emanate a pleasing remoteness and the house of the Grazidei family is snug and warm, with a commanding father (stage and film actor Tommaso Ragno), a worn-out mother and seven children crowding around the table.
One anomaly is immediately striking: the father – who is the village schoolteacher — is a white-haired gent no longer spry as a mountain goat on his legs, but the latest addition to the family is a wailing newborn infant. Even taking into account the period’s high infant mortality rate, the Graziadei family seems over-populated and the expression “one more mouth to feed” an understatement. It is clear that this sensitive, cultivated man who loves teaching kids and classical music is also a traditional patriarch who makes all the decisions in the house, even bad ones regarding his children’s future.
Another oddity is the presence of Pietro, a young Sicilian deserter who is in hiding from the army with the complicity of the villagers. In spite of – or because of – the language and culture gap, he and the teacher’s eldest daughter Lucia are drawn to each other. One of the film’s small pleasures are the innocent ways they find to express their feelings, particularly since Pietro is illiterate. The growing affection between the two does not go unnoticed by the younger members of the family, who pour over the primitively drawn love notes Lucia receives from her innamorato. Nor is the couple at pains to hide their feelings from the rest of the town – which given the cramped living conditions and active gossip mill would probably be impossible, anyway.
Other amusing references to sex pop up unexpectedly throughout the story, showing that prudishness is not the major issue it was, say, in Catholic Ireland. What leads to the fatal denouement here – a shocker by any standard – is a moral failing that village tradition (and many viewers) cannot forgive. It leaves the Graziadei family upside down, and even their strong family bonds seem to unable to heal the psychological wounds.
Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity. One wishes for a more emotional and convincing ending.
Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman creates an extraordinary world out of whiteness and mountain contours and later, when the snow melts, the unexpected greening of the landscape. A beautiful half-light sculpts faces, cows and objects with painterly reverence, echoed on the music track by Vivaldi on the teacher’s gramophone player.
Director, screenplay: Maura Delpero
Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Orietta Notari, Carlotta Gamba, Santiago Fondevila Sancet, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Patrick Gardner, Enrico Panizza, Luis Thaler, Simone Bendetti, and with Sara Serraiocco
Producers: Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli, Carole Baraton, Pauline Boucheny, Jacques-Henri Bronckart, Tatjana Kozar
Cinematography: Mikhail Krichman
Editing: Luca Mattei
Production design: Pirra, Vito Giuseppe Zito, Marina Pozanco
Costume design: Andrea Cavalletto
Music: Matteo Franceschini
Sound: Dana Farzanehpour, Hervé Guyader, Emmanuel de Boissieu
Production companies: Cinedora, Charades Productions, Versus Production
World Sales: Charades
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian, Italian dialect
119 minutes