‘Vermiglio’ Review: Sprawling Italian World War II Drama Engages and Impresses, but Never Rivets

World War II is raging across Europe, but there’s no gunfire in the mountainous village of Vermiglio. There, life goes on much as it has for hundreds of years, albeit with some subtle adjustments, in Italian writer-director Maura Delpero’s considered if conventional second feature.

Inspired in part by the director’s own family history, Venice competitor Vermiglio tracks how global and local events shape the lives of the large Delpero family, a brood who have a fraction more status in the community because the clan patriarch Caesar (Tammaso Ragno) is the local schoolmaster. However, the arrival of Pietro (Giuseppe de Domenico), a Sicilian veteran who takes a shine to Caesar’s daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), will have deep repercussions.

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A superabundance of subplots create a certain torpor even though the film is only a scant two hours long. Still, the portrait of a nearly vanished rural way of life remains compelling, and the melodrama engaging enough to suggest this might have been improved by being spread thinner as a TV series.

As Delpero demonstrated with her last well-regarded drama Maternal, she has a knack with actors, especially young and non-professional performers. And there are a lot of neophytes here to work with, mostly kids that belong to the story’s central Delpero family. Although Caesar looks almost grandfatherly with his shock of white hair, he’s still keen to enjoy his conjugal rights with his somewhat younger wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli), who has had about ten children already.

Adele uncomplainingly spends almost the entire film pregnant or breastfeeding another newborn, obligating her widowed sister Cesira (Orietta Notari) and the older children to take on many extra household duties. Eldest Lucia seems to enjoy her main daily chore, milking the cow each morning, perhaps because it’s one way to get a bit of peace and quiet in the noisy household, away from the other kids who all sleep together each night in cramped beds, sharing secrets, wishes and dreams.

One day Cesira’s son Attilio (Santiago Fondevila Sancet) returns from the war, injured and obviously shellshocked, helped back by a comrade-at-arms from the front, Pietro. Shy, illiterate and naturally a man of few words anyway, Pietro nevertheless manages to spark with Lucia and soon he proposes to marry her, especially when she gets pregnant. When the war ends at last and he insists he must go home to Sicily to check on his mother, a hugely pregnant Lucia is supportive and accepts his absence. But when weeks pass and no word is heard from Pietro, Lucia wilts with sorrow and loneliness, her mental health suddenly declining precipitously.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family struggle with poverty and the deprivations of wartime. Adele and Caesar quarrel when he spends some of their tiny income on a new gramophone record of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” music being one of his great passions. At least he tries to help his students to appreciate it as well via a moving lesson in the classroom. But the family has only enough savings to send one child away for secondary education in the city. They must decide who would benefit more from the opportunity, clever Flavia (Anna Thaler) or dutiful Ada (Rachele Potrich).

In between the bouts of familial drama, Delpero emphasizes the regular rhythms of seasonal change and farm work with slow long shots of characters moving deliberately through the craggy landscape. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who shot all of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s features from The Return to Loveless, evokes a sense of the sublime in the sweeping vistas, blinding snowscapes and secretive forests that, in true Romantic-period fashion, is not exactly comforting or merely picturesque. Nature sustains these people but can also kill them, especially the most vulnerable like the littlest babes.

It will take a village to get them all through the winter. But there’s a strong foreboding about how long that village will stay together after the war, with so many longing to move far abroad or just on to another town where shaming secrets wouldn’t be known. No wonder one sister sees more of a future for herself in becoming a nun rather than staying home.