Vermiglio
First screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Maura Delpero. Cast: Martina Scrinzi, Giuseppe de Domenico, Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Patrick Gardner, Carlotta Gamba, Santiago Fondevila, Orietta Notari, Enrico Panizza. Screenplay: Maura Delpero. VOR:④
Extremely accomplished return to a famous tradition of emotionally layered Italian pastoralism. Bit of a ceiling on originality and risk.
This Venice prize-winner remains throughout a handsome extended-family chronicle and an insinuating Alpine village saga. For the first of its two hours, I admired its storytelling and world-building without feeling totally engrossed, and without sensing a huge amount of originality. Vermiglio joins a tradition of pastoral realism and rich but precarious romanticism where Italian predecessors like the Taviani Brothers or Ermanno Olmi often set up shop, though writer-director Maura Delpero's foray into this legacy featured, I thought, one or two fewer layers of emotional gradation.
But then, somewhere around the midpoint, though I'd struggle to establish just when, Vermiglio starts feeling tougher, at once more inviting and more demanding emotionally. Maybe this shift corresponded to the growing complexities in the inevitable love-match between saucer-eyed Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) and taciturn Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian fugitive from Mussolini's army? Maybe it arose from the physical and spiritual endurance of matriarch Adele (Roberto Rovelli), a mother more than ten times over, though not all the babies have lived? Maybe it emanated outward from the stern treatment that paterfamilias Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) shows in the classroom to an unpromising student who is also his oldest son, Dino (Patrick Gardner), or from the doting advocacy he shows toward his young daughter Flavia (Anna Thaler). Maybe a sense of internal shift amplified amidst the tempered semi-support that Cesare offers his middle daughter, Ada (Rachele Potrich), who is so starved for companions and so curious about physical affection that she discreetly but compulsively masturbates behind a bureau—then atones just as compulsively to Mary and Jesus. Maybe it came from the different, breathaking ways (not a compliment) that elder men and elder women in the village blame various victims, even turn on their own children and relations, when terrible fates occasionally befall these youngsters.
All I can say is that Vermiglio felt even more substantial to me as the whole skein of tightly interwoven yarns unspooled, and as the spreading sense of loss and inchoate helplessness on the homefront attached itself by clear implication to so many present-world contexts. The cinematography by Mkhail Krichman only further excels itself as Vermiglio transpires, toying with blurred-out frame edges and iris effects to suggest a tale as subjectively remembered as it is precisely recorded. Krichman also reurposes the chilly but gorgeous palette of highly reflective blues, silvers, and whites familiar from his Andrei Zvyagintsev collaborations (The Return, Loveless, Elena, Leviathan) into a fresh way to regard the high-up Italian Alps as more than just thick snowcover or rolling greenery. For me, Vermiglio transitioned from recounting a story to soliciting emotion, empathy, and identification, without outwardly seeming to adjust its style and temperature all that much. Grade:B+
