Critics reviews

It’s easy to see why Vermiglio has received praise on the festival stage; it’s a hushed yet effectively emotive drama that’s bolstered with the addition of Mikhail Krichman’s stunning cinematography. Yet sadly, it’s hard to overcome the film’s biggest weakness – the ripple effect that comes from its overcomplicated characterisations.

“Vermiglio” is so devoted to evoking a time and place that much of its subtlety does not become apparent until a second viewing. It is a rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.

The storytelling is graceful and deliberate. OK, yes, it’s slow—on purpose, for effect.

Vermiglio is at once delicate and forceful, though this same quality ensures its narrative gets diffuse... Vermiglio’s story comes to us in waves: At first, the dangers and the joys of self-discovery play out through stolen moments and minor secrecies, while the film’s more dramatic moments crash with unexpected force, leaving with it an endless sea of heartbreak.

Maura Delpero’s film, gorgeously shot by Leviathan cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, is a slow-moving fable that unfolds as a novelistic series of pastoral tableaus.

Delpero directs with a steady hand and formal rigor, emphasizing medium shots and sober staging to let audiences soak in the details... “Vermiglio” is rich in textures and tactile pleasures and is performed with conviction by a cast mixing professional and non-professional actors... “Vermiglio” will likely find a receptive arthouse audience that can appreciate its unassuming majesty.

It is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets in the wartime Italian countryside, in the manner of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers. It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

With head bowed, over clasped hands, Italian director Maura Delpero‘s quietly breathtaking “Vermiglio” unfolds from tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow, into a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps.

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.

Beautifully shot, played by a mix of professional actors and locals and spoken mostly in dialect, Vermiglio feels both authentic and almost restrained to a fault.

For a film that is so purposely languid and restrained as a portrait of isolation, to call it dreary would in some ways argue in its favor, as it is intentionally depicting the tedium of waiting for the world to start anew. Unlike in more action-packed cinematic depictions of the war, this remote populace has no choice but embrace the mundanity while the conflict’s consequences slowly and subtly infuse into its DNA.

Technically, it is a marvel of period filmmaking, an immersive view of la vida rustica so bursting with authenticity that it may inspire more enthusiastic viewers to put on a folk hat and get a job in a heritage museum working the spinning jenny. Others may not be so gripped by its drawn-out drama; box-office blockbuster material it is not.