Vermiglio Review


1944, the Italian mountain village of Vermiglio. Well down below, WW2 is burning on. Many villagers have lost members of their family to the war, but up in Vermiglio day-to-day life continues on pretty much as usual. Until, that is, two deserters arrive, seeking sanctuary. One, Pietro (Giuseppe de Dominico), falls swiftly for Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), one of the many children of the village’s single schoolteacher, Cesare (Tommaso Ragno).
As the months go past, Pietro and Lucia grow ever closer, to the unhappiness of some of Vermiglio’s citizens, who disapprove of his desertion. Meanwhile, the other members of Lucia’s voluminous family are embroiled in dramas of their own.
On the face of it, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is pitched as a tale of wartime romance. While that is certainly a thread of the movie’s rich tapestry, it is just that – it actually doesn’t dominate the narrative. Pietro and Lucia’s love story is told largely in heated looks and gentle touches; we barely hear them speak two words to each other, and they are often off to the side of any of the village’s many social gatherings. The apartness of their relationship, the fact that we’ve been kept at an arm’s length from them for most of the movie, pays dividends in the third act, with the reveal of an ambiguity of motivation that Delpero is brave enough to leave unresolved.
Patiently, evocatively, Delpero paints a portrait of a place that is not quite attached to the rest of the world – a place where the privilege of being able to carry on normally through the deadliest conflict of all time is paid for with a sense of strange, gnawing isolation, claustrophobia and dissatisfaction.
Lucia’s mostly younger brothers and sisters have that usual urge to break out and explore the world, make a life for themselves. But they can’t escape the oversight of their stern father, whose position as their schoolteacher gives him an outsized influence on which of them will get to fly the nest and move on to further education (there isn’t enough money for them all to do so), and who has flown as high as they are ever going to. Though their mother, Adele (Roberta Rovelli), is more sympathetic, she’s too distracted by the recent loss of her newborn to be of much emotional help to her older children. The kids, all ten of them, are on their own.
And it’s in depicting the support network that springs up between them out of necessity that Delpero’s film succeeds most of all. Nothing is spelt out for us, and nor is it for them. Left to fend for themselves in this isolated world, to work out what all the adults are talking about, what to do with the unexpected bubbling up of unexpected romantic feelings for another girl in the village, or what the rest of their lives are going to look like, the siblings turn to each other for comfort and guidance. The tender warmth of their relationships, contrasted against the literal and figurative chill of their surroundings, is what makes Vermiglio so quietly moving.
★★★★