The setting for Maura Delpero’s second feature is a sleepy wartime village in the Italian Alps, but the languid nature of the film is so soporific it borders on anesthetizing; indeed when the credits finally roll, it might be worth checking yourself for scars and other signs of organ harvesting. Technically, it is a marvel of period filmmaking, an immersive view of la vida rustica so bursting with authenticity that it may inspire more enthusiastic viewers to put on a folk hat and get a job in a heritage museum working the spinning jenny. Others may not be so gripped by its drawn-out drama; box-office blockbuster material it is not.
The year is 1944, and the war in Europe is still in bloom, with no end in sight. The center of Vermiglio, the village that gives the film its title, is the local school, which is presided over by the ever-so-slightly draconian but certainly patriarchal head teacher Caesar (Tommaso Ragno). Being the father of nine children, with another one on the way, means that a fair proportion of his charges are his own brood, although not all live up to his exacting standards. Some, he is sure, will go on to bigger and brighter things. The others will be condemned to a life of domestic or rural drudgery, like his daughter Ada (Rachele Potrich) and son Dino (Patrick Gardner). Dino especially gets his ire, causing his wife to admonish him: “It’s not his fault he’s the teacher’s son.”
Caesar’s Cheaper By the Dozen homelife is established early on, with the children packed three to a bed, and Delpero frequently returns to his offspring as kind of naïve Greek chorus. Like the Von Trapp family, they are plentiful and age-diverse. One of the youngest gets excited after receiving “two tangerines” on the feast of Saint Lucia. The eldest, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) — who could be 16 going on 70, given the prematurely ageing qualities of rural life — finds her head being turned when her soldier brother Attilio (Santiago Fondevila Sancet) returns from the war with his new friend Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) in tow.
Pietro is from Sicily, with an accent some find hard to understand. He is also illiterate, which Caesar tries to deal with by including him in the adult classes he sets up at the school. The fact that he speaks very little doesn’t seem bother anyone at all: “Men who come back from the war have secrets,” someone says. “It’s like their tongues have been cut out.” Pietro is quick to register his affection for Lucia, however, passing her notes that begin as a hand-drawn hearts and, after a bit of schooling, quickly become rudimentary declarations of love.
Lucia falls for him and the pair marry, which, dramatically speaking (though we don’t yet know it), is perhaps the defining moment of the film. When he subsequently disappears back to Sicily, and radio silence ensues, it’s a source of anxiety — but mostly on behalf of the family, who worry about Lucia’s mental health as a war widow (“Without a man, the wheels start to come off”). Although it is very much concerned with the limited choices facing the women of Vermiglio, Delpero’s film is also about the presence — and absence — of the men in their world. Pietro’s vanishing act is simply seen as a side effect of the conflict, and no one judges him for it. They simply wait, and wait, and wait.
Who Pietro really is, and why he’s actually missing, is arguably what the film is leading up to, but we find out about his polyamorous ways in the same way that Lucia does, from a newspaper. In narrative terms, it’s frustrating, but, in a subtle way, it does fit with what Delpero is trying to say about this world: the people of Vermiglio are not stupid (most of the children can read), not incapable of sophistication (Caesar likes Chopin and Vivaldi, and believes music to be “food for the soul”), and not incurious (they pore over maps and discuss other countries and continents); they are simply disconnected and isolated in a beautiful snow globe, in a world that is about to change around them, its innocence shattered.
Title: Vermiglio
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Sales Agent: Charades
Director/screenwriter: 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
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins
