VERMIGLIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Vermiglio, Janus Films / Sideshow

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2024

The story, such as it is, of writer/director Maura Delpero's Vermiglio concerns a family in a small Italian village in the waning period of World War II in Europe. It's a place of many traditions, as well as more lies, secrets, and uncertainties.

On its face, the movie doesn't say much, as these characters go about their usual business and have it occasionally but significantly interrupted by the presence of an outsider. He's a soldier who has deserted from the army, along with the cousin of the central family, because the war was no longer about Italy or Italians but the continuation of the failing efforts of Nazi Germany. Even people fighting under and for one dictator, apparently, have their limits.

Politics don't matter in this place, though, and if the people of Vermiglio know about their own authoritarian ruler or the one with which Italy is allied, they don't speak of such matters. Such things have nothing to do with the daily routines, maintenance, gossip, and sustainability of life in a remote village such as this one. The people work, eat meals with their families, celebrate Mass and holy days with their neighbors, and otherwise keep to themselves—except when some villager's life becomes too complicated or scandalous for anyone to ignore.

Delpero treats all of this, not as drama, but almost as a detached act of observation. Admirably, her characters feel as if they could exist without a camera capturing these specific events. Indeed, Delpero and editor Luca Mattei sometimes omit key moments or begin a scene via dialogue before the images of the previous scene have finished. The effect is of life going on, regardless of what the camera might see and despite some expectation of what constitutes drama. We're witnesses to these lives more than we're an audience to some story being told.

The technique is thoughtful and gives the village, its inhabitants, and their ways of life a sense of verisimilitude. However, Delpero is also telling a story—about how this way of life and the attitudes of the villagers come to define how their neighbors are perceived and, hence, how those lives turn out. In that regard, the movie is underwhelming.

The patriarch of the family is a man named Cesare (Tommaso Ragno), the only teacher in town, apparently, who has educated generations of villagers and their children. That includes his own kids, who number eight—including a newborn baby—when the story opens. Cesare's wife Adele (Roberta Robelli) must be pregnant more often than she isn't, because their children age as young as the infant and as old as Dino (Patrick Gardner), whose school days are coming to an end and who will be doing manual labor soon enough. Cesare is not the kind of man to sugarcoat, especially with his own kids.

The thing about Delpero's approach to this material is how distanced the eyewitness perspective makes it. Take the wife, for example, who does seem to exist simply to give birth to more kids, to keep up with household duties, and to ensure that her daughters have a "proper" example of what a woman, a wife, and a mother should be. What does Adele think of this position? The movie doesn't have an answer, because this is neither her nor any particular character's story.

Considering how much the tale eventually deals with the girls and women in this family, it's odd that Adele, apart from one scene in which she mildly scolds her husband for not giving her flowers, seems as if she exists in the backdrop of her own life. There's objectivity here, of course, but that also starts to look like incuriosity on Delpero's part.

The main through line has to do with Cesare and Adele's eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who begins falling for the deserter, named Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico). The two sneak away to hold hands and kiss with increasing passion, and if it seems as if they never speak to each other, that is likely the case. Pietro, who originally comes from Sicily, is illiterate and also traumatized by his time in the war. Cesare teaches him and some others in an adult class, which allows Pietro to sweetly add his name and Lucia to the hearts he draws for her.

Some other little details include younger daughters Flavia (Anna Thaler), whom Cesare believes is smart enough to send to boarding school, and Ada (Rachele Potrich), who is devoutly religious but hides behind a wardrobe to "sin." She punishes herself, usually involving chicken feces, whenever temptation overwhelms her, and it really does when she discovers a book of photographs in her father's locked drawer and starts talking to Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), who sneaks cigarettes in the barn and always wears her blouse just a little low.

Things go wrong, of course, in ways that leave Lucia and the entire family in a state of shame and communal judgment. Delpero and we keep watching, still removed from the characters and whatever notions might be beneath the storytelling. For all its specificity of period and culture, Vermiglio still doesn't have much to say on that surface, which is fine. The movie's lack of genuine curiosity or insight about these characters, their situation, and how the filmmaker feels about any of it, though, means there's not much going on beneath the surface, either.

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