By M. Faust

Awarded Best International Feature Film at the prestigious Venice Film Festival last year, Vermiglio is set in a small village in the Alps of northern Italy. It would take either an incompetent or an indifferent cinematographer to make this region look anything less than spectacular, and Mikhail Krichman is neither of those.

The Russian cameraman who shot all of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s films (The Return and Loveless played locally) fills the screen with mostly static shots, seldom moving the camera so that we are always aware of the power of the landscapes. It may involve more of the white stuff than Buffalonians care to see after the snowiest winter in recent memory, but otherwise this is a film that you could enjoy looking at even if it weren’t subtitled in English. 

Spanning the single year from December 1944 through December 1945, Vermiglio shows the indirect effects of World War II on a village that is far removed from the actual fighting. Two young men have recently arrived after escaping from a German POW camp. Native son Attilio (Santiago Fondevila Sancet) was carried the last part of the trek by his comrade Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian whose dialect is incomprehensible to the locals. He is hidden in the barn of the Graziadei family, grateful relatives of the shell-shocked Attilio. 

The Graziadeis are the focus of the story, and their number can confound the viewer suddenly thrown into the middle of their lives. Father Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) is the local schoolteacher, and his one-room class seems to consist largely of his own children. Depending from what point you start counting, there are about ten of them, with an aunt on hand to help perpetually exhausted mother Adele (Roberta Rovelli). 

The story eventually narrows down to the three teenaged daughters. The oldest, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), finds herself drawn to the mysterious Pietro. Ada (Rachele Potrich) is a dreamer who yearns for a better education than she can get locally. But because the family can only afford to send one child away to school, Cesare picks Flavia (Anna Thaler), to whom studies come easily. 

I started out by praising the look of the film because it is far stronger than its storytelling. It is the second feature from Italian writer-director Maura Delpero, who reportedly based it to some degree on her own family history.

Working with a mostly non-professional cast, she presents this hardscrabble rural life with a clear eye. But in her reticence to play on the emotions of the viewer, she often asks us to do a lot of work to keep up with events. The arrival of Attilio and Pietro takes place before the beginning of the film and is revealed to us only in bits of conversation. The apparent psychological breakdown of one (or two) characters late in the film is frustratingly vague: I was certain that one scene depicted a suicide, only to be proven wrong a few minutes later. 

One reviewer noted that the scope and meaning of Vermiglio only became apparent on a second viewing. That may be, but it’s a little more than should be expected of audiences. It opens this week (Friday, Feb. 28) at the North Park Theater, whose large screen certainly offers the best way to look at this visually spectacular film.