It’s hard to think of a quieter, calmer film released so far in 2024 than Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio. Here is a film that, from start to finish, is composed of stoic faces, distant emotion, subtle and restrained plot movements, and shots so still that I genuinely at one point thought the screen had frozen. The result is somewhere halfway between hypnosis and just plain boredom, the lives of villagers in the Italian Alps in 1944 illuminated in such a matter of fact way that you wonder if somehow Delpero has actually just travelled back in time to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
The cast here is a mix of professional and non-professional, but it is established actor Tommaso Ragno who gets top billing as Cesare, the local schoolteacher in the small village of Vermiglio (he’s also a prolific reproducer, half the kids in his class being his own). It’s him and his family that drive what drama there is here after the village’s sleepy, repressed rhythms are interrupted by the arrival of two soldiers who have deserted the Italian army. One of these soldiers is a friend of Cesare’s family, but the other is Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian stranger who falls in love with Cesare’s daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi).
Soon, Lucia falls pregnant, but Cesare must eventually return to his family in Sicily after Italy’s involvement in the war ends, promising to write to Lucia but staying ominously silent, bringing suspicion and shame into Cesare’s household. Lucia’s siblings also get their own struggles – her nearly-adult brother Dino (Patrick Gardner) is more interested in wine than his own future, while her younger sister Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is a lesbian who lacks the language or cultural touchstones to understand or express that beyond a sense of religious self-loathing.
Even as these issues come to a head, Delpero never really raises the temperature of this film. Key plot points come and go, having more on-screen impact as gossip after the fact than as events in their own right, while performances are muted. This does serve a purpose – the war has clearly left this village in a state of near-catatonic anxiety as their young men fight at the front under the command of the Germans – but I can’t say it makes for particularly gripping watching. The exception to this comes in the form of the younger kids, whose curiosity and playfulness has not yet been dulled; the interactions between the little ones and their big brothers and sisters make up all of Vermiglio’s funniest and most touching moments.
Of course, given the setting, Vermiglio also looks spectacular, changing through the seasons from a snowbound winter with beautiful sapphire-blue night skies to a slightly manic spring and an eventual trip down to a richly golden Sicily in the summer. The slowest of burns (I hadn’t even really nailed down who all the characters were until about an hour in), Vermiglio can be a slog, but, for me, there’s just about enough beauty and intelligence here to make it worth it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 