J Paul Johnson
If like me you are predisposed to love a story told in the crisp winter air of the Italian Alps—like, say, one of my very favorites of recent vintage, The Eight Mountains—Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is certain to please. Set in a small Alpine village during the final days of WWII, Vermiglio is the story of a family whose lives, so long so certain and unwavering, are upended by a Sicilian outsider. Winner of the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Official Selection for the 2025 Academy Awards, Vermiglio offers its viewers the icy beauty of the Alps, shot in stunning natural light, framing the story of a provincial family in a remote village that feels practically suspended in time. It is lavish and lovely—and yet either too long or not quite long enough to feel complete.
The family at the center of Vermiglio is that of patriarch Cesare (Tommaso Ragno), the village schoolteacher, a gifted and intelligent man who is better at loving art and ideas than his own family, including his nearly-always-pregnant wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli). They are distant from the war but not oblivious to it, and one day in 1944 two deserting soldiers arrived at Cesare’s family’s doorstep. One is Cesare’s nephew; the other, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), is Sicilian—a place mysterious and distant to the family. Pietro is quickly smitten with Cesare’s oldest daughter, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), and their budding romance is watched carefully by her two younger sisters, Ada (Rachele Potrich), the middle of three, and Flavia (Anna Thaler), the youngest.
The romance between Pietro and Lucia constitutes the bulk of Vermiglio‘s tenuous narrative, driving the plot forward through their marriage, war’s end, and her pregnancy. Yet these two are probably the film’s least well-developed characters, at least until an offscreen development reveals that Pietro’s quiet demeanor harbored a significant secret. More interesting than their romance itself is the perception of it by Lucia’s sisters at different stages of adolescence.
Middle sister Ada is the most pious and obedient of the three, at least on the surface. Tempted by her own desires and discoveries, Ada watches studiously, her gaze always a little askance, as Lucia is wooed and as orphaned Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), also a little older than she, smokes, saunters, and sulks. Ada invents measures of self-penitence I doubt the church elders ever imagined, making for some gently comic and insightful moments.
Sadly, Ada is also, in her schoolteacher-father’s eyes, something of a dullard, especially in comparison to the bright and studious Flavia. Cesare delivers his judgment of each student’s academic performance in Vermiglio with the gravitas of Moses on the mount and absolutely no sensitivity or preference to his daughters’ feelings, leaving bright Flavia and dull Ada with very different futures to contemplate. Cesare teaches all of the village’s children together in a single class; their village is so small and remote they speak a dialect that must be translated to Italian. The film even plays with subtitles in Italian theaters.
The story of the three sisters is Vermigilo‘s most affecting. Cesare is himself a complex character, a considerable intellect and capable teacher who loves classical music and literature but has not learned from it how to love the women in his life—or, for that matter, the boys and men in it either. The youngest, little Pietrin (Enrico Panizza) adores his older brother Dino (Patrick Gardner), but the older boy is constantly disappointing Cesare. Aside from the complexities of these familial relationships, the film’s plot consists mostly of the passing of time.
Where Vermiglio passes its time is in a village that is lovingly and lavishly shot with sumptuous, carefully controlled cinematography in the Italian Alps. The mountains often form a formidable background in exterior scenes, and interiors are lit, naturally, with the studious composition of a Vermeer. Delpero and her team, including director of photography Mikhail Krichman, have fastidiously limited the color palette to icy blues, cool greens, tinted greys, and ever-so-occasional exceptions—with impressive results. With its artful mise-en-scene and perfectly cast ensemble of leads, supporting cast, and extras, Vermiglio looks and feels like a story of its era yet also evergreen.
In choosing to construct Vermiglio‘s story as that of a village and performed by an ensemble, Delpero has made something of a calculated risk. No one character’s story is elevated over any other’s, and the film is less the narrative of an individual or couple than that of a collective. At exactly two hours of runtime, it feels either slightly underdeveloped—I wish, for instance, we learned more of what would become of quirky Ada as she pursues a life for which she seems uniquely ill-prepared—or overlong, relying too much on the uninteresting romance of Pietro and Lucia to nudge its plot along. Even so, Vermiglio is well worth seeing, a loving and lavish re-creation of a time long lost in the wake of World War II.
