Despite a slow-burning start, once I got pulled into writer-director Maura Velpero’s intimate World War 2 family drama Vermiglio (winner of the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Official Selection for the 2025 Academy Awards), I didn’t want it to end.
Imbued with shades of The Leopard, The Last Valley, and Little Women, this tale (set in 1944) takes place in an Alpine hamlet in Italy. Save the occasional sound of a passing aircraft, the war doesn’t intrude directly into the villagers’ daily life. However, the effects of war are palpable; food is scarce (money even more so), infant mortality is high, and most of the young men are serving at the front.
Valpero frames her narrative around a year or so in the life of the populous Graziadei family. The patriarch is Caesare (Tommaso Ragno). Caesar is the village’s resident schoolteacher, conducting general ed classes for children and reading classes for illiterate adults.
His visibly life-tired wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is pregnant with their 11th child (two of their children died as infants), and is chagrined that Caesare continues to take money out of their meager finances to purchase classical records (he haughtily defends the purchases as necessary tools to teach the arts).
He counts a number of his own children among the students in the one-room school; he is hardest on his eldest son Dino (Patrick Gardner), who he cruelly browbeats in front of his classmates. He shows a soft spot for his daughters, particularly precocious Flavia (Anna Thaler), who is one of his brightest students.
The heart of the tale is parlayed via the tight relationship between three of the sisters: the aforementioned Flavia and her older siblings Ada (Rachele Potrich) and the enigmatic Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who all share a bed (and their secrets).
One day, a Sicilian army deserter (Giuseppe De Domenico) takes refuge in the village. Lucia is instantly smitten; the feeling appears to be mutual. Once nature takes its inevitable course, a seismic shift ensues within the family’s dynamics.
This is a simple, yet universal tale that transcends the era it is set in (which is captured with great verisimilitude). I think the story also works as both an elegy to the final vestiges of Old World traditionalism and as a harbinger of post-war mores (I gleaned a nascent feminism in Lucia’s character, a la “Linda” in David Leland’s Wish You Were Here).
Naturalistic performances all around; particularly from first-time actor Scrinzi. Lovely cinematography by Mikhail Krichman (that lush Alpine scenery paints itself). An honest, raw, and emotionally resonant film.
(Opens in Seattle February 28; check for theaters near you here)
Previous posts with related themes:
Grave of the Fireflies/Son of Babylon/Testament
The Earth is as Blue as an Orange
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley