italian films

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, Ada, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

Bread & Tulips (Pane e tulipani) was a huge success in Italy when it was released in 2000, sweeping their version of the Academy Awards and even earning “official selection” status at Cannes and at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yet it’s actually a light, tender-hearted comedy about second chances in life and love, especially where kind souls are involved. (It’s available on Netflix Instant video as well.)

Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.

The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.

Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.

The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.

Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:

Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right.

Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.

What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.

Vermiglio.

Bread and Tulips.

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