A glimpse into rural life: ‘Vermiglio’ and the echoes of the past
Introduction to a hidden gem
With a bowed head and clasped hands, Italian director Maura Delpero’s quietly breathtaking film, Vermiglio, unfolds from the tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics to the hide of a dairy cow. This film offers a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps. Far away, the Second World War is ending—an earthshaking event felt here only in abstract ways. The real labor of community and family takes precedence, as does the private work of finding one’s own path beneath those towering peaks. For those who live on these slopes, the mountains are the beginning and end of everything, the amen on every prayer.
The rhythm of daily life
It is winter, and a sleeping household, with two or three to a bed, gradually stirs. The eldest daughter, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), milks the cow, dreamily resting her face against the animal’s warm flank. Her mother, Adele (Roberta Rovelli), heats the milk and doles it out among her seven children, along with hunks of dipping-bread for breakfast. Automatically, the jostling kids arrange themselves in order of size at the stout table around which so much of this family’s life is centered. At its head always sits Adele’s husband, Caesar (Tommaso Ragno), a stern but not unloving patriarch with the sonorous voice of a man used to being obeyed. He runs the local one-room school where all of his kids, except his youngest, sickly infant, are taught the same lessons regardless of age.
The changing seasons and family dynamics
Over the course of the changing seasons, the gaze of Mikhail Krichman’s magnificently austere, self-possessed camera is divided among the many family members. It catches each of them at work or rest as the carbolic-scrubbed harshness of their daily domestic routines is offset by community gatherings, bursts of play, and those times when Caesar brings his beloved gramophone into the classroom to teach his students to hear the summer in Vivaldi’s music. While other relationships are outlined—eldest son Dino (Patrick Gardner) is surly and resentful toward his father; flirtatious neighbor Virginia (Carlotta Gamba) causes a flutter of sexual confusion—the focus gradually shifts to Caesar’s daughters.
The daughters’ stories
There’s Flavia (Anna Thaler), the smart one destined to win the only chance for a proper education that the family can afford. Ada (Rachele Potrich), the strange, dark one with her notebook full of self-devised atonements for the sinful times she sneaks behind the wardrobe door to touch herself. And then there’s pretty Lucia, falling for Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a soulful-eyed soldier from Sicily who saved her uncle’s life and then deserted with him to hide out in the village.
A romance amidst turmoil
Lucia and Pietro’s romance is told in glances, fumbles, and illiterate love notes delivered through the bedroom window. Meanwhile, the old, non-military-age men who gather in the village argue over the wisdom of hiding the outsider. “Deserters are nothing but cowards!” declaims one tipsy blowhard. “If only they were all cowards, there wouldn’t be any war,” observes Caesar mildly. Soon, there’ll be a wedding and another pregnancy. Though life in these parts is hard and a certain amount of tragedy is expected, the calamity, when it comes, will be, like all calamities, unforeseen.
The art of storytelling
The editing by Luca Mattei is evocative through economy. Simply by cutting from Adele superstitiously wrapping her ailing infant son in cabbage leaves to a shot of the falling snow, we understand—even before we see Adele, already pregnant again, grieving at a little cross—that in the interim, the child has died. Economy is the watchword of this deceptively formalist film. Every aspect of the filmmaking, from Krichman’s immaculate compositions to the worn, neat costuming from Andrea Cavalletto to the simplicity of Matteo Franceschini’s spartan piano-based score, speaks to the restraint that Delpero exercises in playing on our feelings. Not because she herself does not feel, but because, like her stoic characters, she is holding herself in check with an almost brutal degree of self-discipline. It contributes to a fascinating narrative remove, which is belied by the close-up clarity of the imagery. Up here in the clean alpine air, no matter how distant your vantage point, you can see forever.
Reflections on generational memory
None of us has to go very far back in our family history before stumbling on a gap in the generational, hand-me-down memories that no living relative can fill. The remarkable, raw-boned, and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense. This perspective is not quite Godlike but comes from that which we might as well call God—the spirit of the mothers, sisters, and daughters who came before and after, and who trusted the imperious mountains to keep their secrets.
For more information and to watch the trailer, visit Vermiglio.
Note: The links provided in this article are for illustrative purposes and may not lead to actual content.