Young Critics review: Vermiglio

Review by Ana Đošev

Hidden in the cocoon of wooded alpine glades, far away from the battlefield yet victims of its evils, lives the Graziadei family, in what could be called a dignified scarcity. Their filmic existence has been brought to the screen by director Maura Delpero in Vermiglio (2024), a portrayal of a Trentine home shaken by the consequences of The Second World War and the emergence of a foreign visitor. They live a life that’s simple, but not bleak; it’s uniformed, but never seems to be stripped of the lively colors of youth. Like an enlarged beehive, everyone ensures that their role in the family structure is fulfilled and that the orders of the parents are rightfully obeyed. The father is the stone-cold, orderly head of the house, but really a man easily swooned by passions and vices hiding behind a stern interior. The mother, the soft-spoken housewife with her scarved head always bowed down has little time for sincere emotion and grieving, even after losing her newborn. Their kids, the little snow angels, live each in their own world, but almost always with a firm foot on the ground and genuine love for one another.

Everything shifts the moment a young Sicilian war deserter is brought to their estate by a cousin who came back from the front. The charming southerner Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) brings with him the smell of gunpowder and tangerines, just a dash of it being enough to charm the oldest sister, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi). Scorned by the villagers for running away from duty, he lives in a one-man enclave. His ability to disrupt an entire family might make many cinephiles think of Pasolini’s Teorema. But instead of mystical eroticism and emptiness, Pietro’s (un)presence triggers a rafale of unfortunate and tragic circumstances, that Lucia, like the blinded virginal saint she’s named after, couldn’t have possibly foreseen.

Subtleness is the keyword of this wartime family drama—the camera takes on slow and careful movements, immersing the viewer into the semantic value of every shot. There is never excess dialogue and the actors are allowed to speak from their silence. The nuanced and toned-down approach is both a stylistic choice and a way of illustrating the characters’ mentality—their quelling of their own emotions. Tragedy is presented in a way that’s so inevitable that it becomes pious. Lucia, who at one point becomes so ridden with pain that she’s unable to properly function, does so with the elegance of a Vermeer girl, mutely suffering in the constraints of her grey winter gown. The middle sister, Ada, spends her days preoccupied with Catholic guilt and avoiding iffy feelings she’s yet to explain. Even the father’s darling, the playful Flavia, reveling in the household privilege, still can’t seem to earnestly process her juvenile wishes. With a tightknit group filled with obligations, fears and repression, the emphasis is put on small scale interactions and minimal gestures, especially in the context of how the children relate to each other. Bedtime whispers and shared Pater Nosters seem to be the highest expression of closeness and vulnerability in their microcosmos. The corporal minimalism of the Graziadei clan makes Virginia, the cigarette smoking rebel and Ada’s amical interest, look very out of place.

The mountainous countryside and the mellow, tidy house (captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman) are frightful not because of their unpredictability, but because of their resistance to change—something or someone is gone, seasons come and go, people pass on, but everything remains pristinely untouched. People move through the space like wild goats, naturally and freely, but never without a frightened hop of the feet. The few ones who break this pattern, like the misunderstood older son Dino, are silently disdained for their inability to live up to what they’re expected to. The passing of time is elegantly depicted through the everchanging Dolomite climate, from taintless snow-topped hills to the blooming of the primavera.

The specificity of the northern Italian landscape and its history and culture play a key role in understanding the unique spirit of the film. The provincial dialects have never been the languages of law and education—on the contrary, bear witness to births, deaths, affairs, celebrations, got passed down in their purest form from father to son. Vermiglio utilizes that ancestral element of the Trentine way of speaking to draw us into a clandestine world. Some of the most refined scenes are those illustrating distinctive local traditions, like the celebration of Santa Lucia, showing the daughter of the same name covered in a sheer white veil, a donkey by her side, walking in front of the villagers in all her innocence. In this way, the otherness of the islander Pietro is accentuated through the lingual dissonance. This movie, even though stemming from the country’s rich history of complex family dramas like Visconti’s decadent period pieces, is important as a reconstructed landmark, a petrified remnant of a particular place and a particular moment. Just like Pietro leaving a man-shaped footprint in the northern snow, Vermiglio sealed itself as a testament of Trentino and the way of being cultivated by generations upon generations of its inhabitants.