Italy’s Oscar Submission Is the Year’s Most Beautiful Film

Maura Delpero channels the spirit of her Italian homeland’s neorealist greats with Vermiglio, in theaters Dec. 25, a breathtaking story about one family’s arduous existence in a remote village during and after WWII. At once intimate and detached, the writer/director’s sophomore effort (following 2019’s Maternal) casts a uniquely engrossing spell as it details the minor joys and major misfortunes and miseries of its tightly knit protagonists, all of whom seek a happiness and contentment that appears just out of reach—or, at times, is snatched from their grasp.

Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion award, and Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, it pulsates with harsh, anguished emotion, thanks in no small part to splendid visuals that make it the most beautiful film of the year.

The small enclave of Vermiglio is nestled in the snow-capped Alps, and it’s there that Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) resides with his sizeable clan, including wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli), daughters Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), Ada (Rachele Potrich), and Flavia (Anna Thaler), and son Dino (Patrick Gardner) and his gaggle of younger brothers.

Cesare is the sole teacher at the local school, offering lessons and deciding which kids are cut out for further education and which are better suited to move onto menial jobs. Theirs is a chilly household, not simply because of the weather but because of their paterfamilias, whose sternness casts a pall over his brood. So too does the ongoing war, which has taken numerous local boys and left their relatives in a state of sorrowful suspended animation.

Vermiglio begins with death in the winter and concludes with birth in the spring, and in-between, it fixates on the turmoil engulfing these individuals. Sleeping in bed together, Lucia, Ada, and Flavia whisper private thoughts and questions to each other that they wouldn’t dare speak aloud during the day, and their tight-knit rapport is a support during their subsequent ups and downs.

Ada is wracked with guilt over routinely hiding in the bedroom corner behind an open cupboard door, her twisting legs indicating that she’s discovered the joy of self-pleasure, and her love of confession is almost as great as Flavia’s interest in her father’s classroom lessons. Cesare believes that Flavia is particularly well-suited to studies, whereas he views Ada as destined for other things, and his outlook on—and orders regarding—his daughters’ fates is one of many factors amplifying their domestic tensions.

Of more pressing concern for Cesare and the rest of his neighbors, however, is the arrival of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian soldier who has deserted the military and taken up residence in his barn. This interloper is, at first, uneasily tolerated by everyone, but despite not speaking their language, he slowly ingratiates himself into the community courtesy of his budding relationship with Lucia.

From gently touching fingers as she shows him the elderberries used to make crowns that they lay on the graves of their fallen relatives—such as Lucia’s youngest brothers, who’ve recently perished—to making out on the floor of the barn, the pair find solace in each other’s arms. When Lucia stops Pietro from getting too physical by making clear that sex only happens after marriage, he passively proposes. Their ensuing wedding is a reasonably joyous occasion for the family and their guests, save for Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), a local tomboy with short hair who scurries off to smoke verboten cigarettes with her shirt off (to avoid having it smell), much to the fascination of Ada.

While Lucia and Adele’s concurrent pregnancies are easy to see, secrets course throughout Vermiglio, discussed in hushed tones and discovered from clandestine hiding spots, as is the case when Flavia sneaks into her father’s study and learns where he keeps the key to his locked desk—a piece of information that Ada later employs to revelatory ends.

Collaborating with cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, Delpero dramatizes her action via one gorgeous composition and tableau after another, from majestic sights of misty mountain peaks hovering above cold, hard edifices, to lone figures silhouetted against radiant sunsets, to interior shots in which shadow and light appear to be sparring for dominion over these unfortunate souls. The film’s images have a natural, intoxicating richness, conveying an entrancing sense of this hard-bitten milieu and its haunted inhabitants.

Vermiglio is awash in captivating, unaffected faces, and yet no matter how close it gets to its characters, they remain at something of a remove—a contradictory situation that’s central to the proceedings’ atmosphere. It’s as if the narrative is playing out beneath a plate of glass, and that impression doesn’t waver even once Lucia receives devastating news that leaves her “ruined” in the eyes of her relatives, frictions mount between Cesar and Dino, and Ava grapples with her sinful impulses (and the remorse they beget).

The air is heavy in this home, but Delpero isn’t just after oppressive despair; rather, she gradually transforms her tale into a multipronged portrait of pride and shame, blame and forgiveness, and betrayal and loyalty that understands both the hardship and pain that threatens to destroy these people, and the resilience they need—and in some cases have—to survive.

Filmed on location in and around its title town, and with natural light that lends it a grim loveliness, Vermiglio uses its arresting aesthetics to enhance its air of hope and despair. Moreover, it embellishes its story with a cornucopia of details and touches—an illness remedy involving tying cabbage to an infant’s head; Dino allowing his adolescent sibling to sleep with him face-to-face instead of head-to-toe; a mother’s callous response to her daughter’s announcement that she’s had her first period—that contribute to its authenticity.

Delpero provides a window onto a bygone world that feels at once lost to time and intensely alive, and in her tale’s final third, she locates a measure of tempered optimism in the plight of Lucia, who recognizes that her sole means of escaping her catatonia-inspiring gloom is to confront the source of her woe. Lucia’s late journey begins with additional heartache and concludes, surprisingly, with the realization that, far from alone, she’s a member of an enormous club of women who’ve been consigned, by tradition and circumstance, to ignominy—a state of affairs that repeats with the same cyclical inevitability as the seasons.