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‘Vermiglio’ Review: A Grave and Gorgeous Hymn to Life and Death in a Midcentury Italian Alpine Village
Italian director Maura Delpero's "Vermiglio" is an intimate epic of miraculous rigor and restraint, set in a remote WWII-era mountain community.
And at its head, always, sits Adele’s husband Caesar (Tommaso Ragno), a stern but not unloving patriarch with the sonorous voice of a man used to being obeyed, who runs the local one-room school where all of his kids, bar his youngest, sickly infant, are taught the same lessons regardless of age. Over the course of the changing seasons, the gaze of Mikhail Krichman’s magnificently austere, self-possessed camera is divided among the many family members, catching each of them at work or rest as the carbolic-scrubbed harshness of their daily domestic routines is offset by community gatherings and bursts of play and those times when Caesar brings his beloved gramophone into the classroom and teaches his students to hear the summer in Vivaldi’s music. But then, economy is the watchword of this deceptively formalist film: every aspect of the filmmaking, from Krichman’s immaculate compositions, to the worn, neat costuming from Andrea Cavalletto to the simplicity of Matteo Franceschini’s spartan piano-based score, speaks to the restraint that Delpero exercises in playing on our feelings.
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