{"id":10785,"date":"2025-05-07T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10785"},"modified":"2025-05-10T10:14:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T14:14:00","slug":"vermiglio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/07\/vermiglio\/","title":{"rendered":"Vermiglio."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vermiglio<\/em> was Italy\u2019s submission for this year\u2019s 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\u2019m Still Here<\/a><\/em> or Emilia P\u00e9rez<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s 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<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village\u2019s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s home couldn\u2019t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven\u2019t 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 \u2013 which, of course, doesn\u2019t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film\u2019s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio<\/em>, 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\u2019s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vermiglio<\/em> is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events \u2013 the death of a child, an unexpected wedding \u2013 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\u2019s domineering parenting style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s the source of many of the family\u2019s problems. He\u2019s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excellent review of Vermiglio<\/em><\/a> that appeared in The Guardian<\/em> said the film had \u201can almost Hardyesque intensity,\u201d just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy\u2019s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it\u2019s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy\u2019s novels that I\u2019ve 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<\/em> 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\u2019s home and waits for something to catch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vermiglio was Italy\u2019s submission for this year\u2019s 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\u2019m Still Here or Emilia P\u00e9rez. It\u2019s a simple story of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,161,686,215],"class_list":["post-10785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-highly-recommended","tag-italian-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10785"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10793,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785\/revisions\/10793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}