TIFF: Sprawling, historical family sagas used to be de rigueur as culminating artistic statements from our greatest talents. They were characterized by the intertwined lives of a large cast of characters—parents, children, and siblings—their hopes and fears, triumphs and disappointments—situated at moments of profound societal change. Classic examples include Thomas Mann‘s “Buddenbrooks” and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s “The Leopard.” It is, thus, heartening to see director Maura Delpero attempting such a tale in just her second narrative feature. The foregrounding of women and domesticity in “Vermiglio” privileges the female gaze, and the taut two-hour runtime demonstrates contemporary economy and pragmatism. In its portrait of familial relations and a bygone past, “Vermiglio” might bring to mind “The White Ribbon” but without the crimes, “Fiddler on the Roof” without the songs, and “Fanny And Alexander” without the opulence and magic realism. “Vermiglio” survives the comparison on each front and provides a superlative entry into the tradition of enthralling family chronicles.
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Vermiglio is a mountain commune in the Italian Alps. The year is 1944, though it might as well be the turn of the 20th century, as the village’s remoteness puts it decades behind contemporary civilization. There’s also the deprivation caused by World War II—all able-bodied men have gone away to fight and likely, to die. Delpero focuses her story on the family of the local teacher, led by patriarch Caesar (Tommaso Ragno) and his wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli). They live in their small house with their three daughters Lucia, Ada, and Flavia (Martina Scrinzi, Rachele Potrich, and Anna Thaler) and four sons Dino, Pietro, Tarcisio, Giacinto (Patrick Gardner, Enrico Panizza, Luis Thaler, Simone Bendetti). Close by is Caesar’s sister Cesira (Orietta Notari). The story starts when Cesira’s son Attilio (Santiago Fondevila Sancet) returns home from the war with Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a handsome Sicilian soldier who saved his life and has now deserted the war.
This is clearly a large cast of characters to keep track of. Still, Delpero scrupulously avoids one of the failures of modern film-making—nakedly and artlessly dumping exposition on the audience—and trusts their intelligence to figure out who is who and how they are related. It is always unnatural in films when family members call out each other’s name and relationship in dialog—”Good morning, Maria, my dear sister”—something that never happens in real life. Today, screenwriters talk down to viewers and force-feed all information upfront in a large poison pill. Delpero understands that it is sufficient to spread out expository information throughout the film as long as it is provided before the conclusion. It invites audience participation and is more efficient. It also honors a somewhat underappreciated aspect of cinema – that the best films aren’t just contained by the two hours it takes to view them; they unspool in viewers’ minds long afterward and reveal new meaning and insights.
The incidents that befall the protagonists in “Vermiglio” are prosaic and quotidian—babies are born and die, people fall in love and marry, children attend school and church, women milk cows, and men cut trees. It is the singular detail that Delpero musters up that brings enormous verisimilitude to her tale. “Vermiglio” isn’t a generic portrait of an Alpine village; it is culled from Delpero’s family history and has the texture and sweep of a novel or, even better, a memoir. The patriarch Caesar has an outsized influence in the village, not just as the local teacher but as a village elder. But his three daughters emerge as protagonists and are granted agency by Delpero every step of the way.
Lucia, the eldest, first makes advances toward Pietro, begins a romance with him, and demands sexual intimacy. When calamity strikes in the latter half, she undertakes a solitary journey to Sciliy—enlarging not just her perspective but the film’s viewpoint. Flavia, the youngest and the brainiest, spies and eavesdrops on her father in her endless curiosity. Nevertheless, she’s the apple of her father’s eye and is selected above other sons and daughters for higher schooling, as the family can only support one child. In a testament to their relationship, Flavia consults him and not her mother when she has her first period. Ada, the middle daughter, scours her father’s porn stache, masturbates behind the cupboard, and then eats literal chicken shit as Christian penance. Bereft of Lucia’s beauty or Flavia’s smarts, she feels adrift and only finds a kindred soul in Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), a wild young woman and a fellow misfit. Delpero’s portrait of womanhood is gratifyingly inclusive and empathetic—representing a diversity of experiences and fates for her characters.
The men, by comparison, are reticent and taciturn. Dino seems destined to be a farmer, and Attilio and Pietro have PTSD. Cesirea pointedly says that war turns men into idiots. The other boys are toddlers. It is the destinies of the three sisters that provide the greatest interest and a point of punctuation at the end of the film.
“Vermiglio” is beautifully constructed in a neat and compact one-year time frame. It allows Delpero and DP Mikhail Krichman to cinematographically chart the passage of time and different seasonal settings in the remote village. The period detail is exemplary, creating the era faithfully and immersing viewers. These are the small touches that Delpero adds like Pietro only using drawings in his love letters to Lucia because he is illiterate. Or that the three girls and four boys sleep in separate rooms, but once Lucia is married, she is given one of the rooms to herself, and the remaining six siblings have to share the other. Caesar, generally a pillar of wisdom, is also rendered human when his wife chastises him for purchasing a Vivaldi record when they can barely feed all the children.
Delpero directs with a steady hand and formal rigor, emphasizing medium shots and sober staging to let audiences soak in the details. She emphasizes the domesticity of home environments—the sounds of babies punctuate many indoor scenes. “Vermiglio” is rich in textures and tactile pleasures and is performed with conviction by a cast mixing professional and non-professional actors. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Oscar submission for Best International Film, “Vermiglio” will likely find a receptive arthouse audience that can appreciate its unassuming majesty. [A]
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