Vermiglio – secrets and lies in idyllic Italian village in the shadow of war

Maura Delpero’s new film was a richly deserving winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Venice film festival this year and will now be a jewel of the selection at Toronto and anywhere else on the festival circuit. It is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets in the wartime Italian countryside, in the manner of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers. It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.
The setting is the remote Alpine village of Vermiglio in 1944. Cesare is the village schoolteacher whose wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is continually pregnant: he is a white-haired, bespectacled man of fierce standards who also runs an adult literacy class and whose prestige in the community equals and exceeds that of the priest. Cesare is played by Tomasso Ragno, looking in Hollywood terms like a cross between Christopher Plummer and Sam Elliott, with innumerable sons and daughters, of whom Dino (Patrick Gardner) is the sulky ne’er-do-well whose mediocrity and drinking pains him.
Among these offspring is Ada (Rachele Potrich), the well-meaning and obedient girl of whose honest efforts in the household and schoolroom Tomasso approves. But he is unaware of Ada’s intense friendship with local girl Virginia (Carlotta Gamba) and Ada’s habit of breaking into his desk and treating herself to impure thoughts, guided by her father’s secret stash of lewd photographs; she also appears to have private solitary moments behind the bedroom cupboard door. Flavia (Anna Thaler) is the academic star due to be sent away to boarding school.
The oldest is sensitive Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) whose destiny is unclear, until a fugitive army deserter shows up; this is Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), helped by Lucia’s cousin Attillo (Santiago Fondevilla) whose life he appears to have saved, and who is now suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Poor Pietro lives hidden away in the barn – although no one seriously fears his detection or for that matter denunciation – and he catches Lucia’s eye at church. Soon they are kissing and getting married with Lucia pregnant; Delpero’s calm, undemonstrative storytelling style contrives for the wedding to happen as matter-of-factly as the heartwrenching death of a baby earlier in the drama.
Tomasso, however, has complex tastes and indulgences; in addition to his private photographic collection, there is his public addiction to gramophone records and he buys them with money which — as his wife furiously reminds him — would be better spent on food. It is food for the soul, he counters, or his soul at any rate, and he likes playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to his class.
Delpero shows that their lives could continue perfectly well like this; it is idyllically happy in some ways, an existence lovingly framed with beautiful shots of the snowy landscape in which you can almost feel the bitter, tingling cold. But the end of the war is the beginning of their problems. Pietro now has to journey south to his home village in Sicily to make contact with his family, and so pregnant Lucia, trusting but uneasy, waves him off, having been promised that he will write. But days and weeks pass without a letter and a dramatic event looms.
There is a compelling drama in Vermiglio, conveyed with an almost Hardyesque intensity; the cow-milking scene at the beginning actually put me in mind of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, although there is no one here of a higher or different social class. It is a movie which inhabits its own universe with ease and calm but also widens it to include the audience who are inducted into its mysteries. A lovely film.