Vermiglio: a slow-burn Italian family saga of immense subtlety

High in the Italian Alps in 1944, village life subsists in precarious isolation from the war but follows the grooves of ingrained tradition. The family of grey-haired school teacher Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno) runs to nine children with a 10th on the way, despite each new addition threatening their ability to feed themselves and further educate their children. 

Among the brood are the adult Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who has caught the eye of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), an illiterate Sicilian army deserter hiding out in the community; the teenage Ada (Rachele Potrich), who dreams up new self-punishments whenever she hides away to touch herself, Flavia (Anna Thaler), the academically bright pre-teen whose eye for the truth is most acute, and the mildly rebellious adult Dino (Patrick Gardner), who kicks against his peasant fate through drink. 

This slow-burn family saga of immense subtlety and quiet observation at first resembles films that seem to yearn for a more authentic rural past (Ermanno Olmi’s works come to mind) but behind its insistence that ‘this is how it was’ lurks a stinging rebuke of the sacrifices made, which comes in passing remarks that run against the predominant accepting flow. It’s a peculiar three-way push-pull between phenomenal restraint, whispered yearning and bitter resentment.   

Although it’s the Alpine environment that’s determined the family’s sparse, fingernail-grasp of a lifestyle, its beauty, revealed in the seductively gorgeous muted-colour cinematography of Mikhail Krichman – highly regarded for his work with Andrey Zvyagintsev (2007’s The Banishment, and 2011’s Elena) – is largely ignored by the protagonists, except when they’re smoking and contemplating the variegated hopelessness of their individual situations.   

Although he espouses some liberal values and loves Chopin and Vivaldi, Cesare’s high position in the village fixes him as a petty tyrant, set apart from the other villagers by his education and from his family by the wielding of life-changing authority. It is he who decides who they can afford to send away for further education, the only escape route bar the prospect of becoming a nun. Perhaps the best example of the film’s counter-narrative comes when he is offended by criticism from his wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) for spending money on gramophone records when they can hardly feed their offspring. “How dare you reproach me in front of the children”, he says, before leaving the room with all the children staring at him. 

The grinding cycle of Adele’s endless childbearing centres the story for a while, with major events of death and Lucia’s marriage to Pietro understated in passing, but it gradually opens out into deeper character portraits of the children before landing its focus on Lucia’s fate after the war ends. She’s pregnant when Pietro leaves to show his mother he’s still alive, but months pass with no word from him so, after the baby is born, she suffers a mental collapse and has to take her fate into her own hands.  

Vermiglio is derived in part from director Maura Delpero’s own family history and is her second fiction feature after Maternal (2019), which focused on young single mothers living in hostels run by nuns (Delpero also made two documentaries, Teachers (2008) and Nadea and Sveta (2012)). She has a real knack for getting the best out of her cast, a mix of actors and non-professionals, all of whom impress, with Martina Scrinzi particularly vivid as Laura. But most peerless in its intimacy is Delpero’s observational acuity: the children’s bedroom crammed with shared beds where critical late night chat takes place, the cowshed with the cow looming, the schoolroom with its wind up gramophone, the mirrored wardrobe door behind which Ada hides, the table around which a dozen people crowd for dinner are all observed with such reverence you can almost smell them. 

But Delpero is to be praised, too, for being so aware of how easily beautifully shot bucolic history dramas evoke a kind of mass photo-book nostalgia, although the restraint, use of inference and speed of editing with which she counteracts sentimentality might leave some viewers looking for stronger encouragements to empathy. In that sense, Vermiglio is a film quietly at war with itself. It delineates situations with the exquisite sensitivity of remembrance while salting in complaint, yet its predominant atmosphere remains one of stoic acquiescence. The rebel is in the detail. 

► Vermiglio screened in the Official Competition at BFI London Film Festival and will arrive in UK cinemas on 17 January 2025.