03/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Maura Delpero gets back to exploring motherhood in a film set at the end of the Second World War, which is visually and mentally stimulating but which ultimately leaves us cold

Martina Scrinzi in Vermiglio, The Mountain Bride

Following on from Maternal [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maura Delpero
film profile], Maura Delpero is returning to the theme of motherhood with Vermiglio, The Mountain Bride [+see also:
trailer
interview: Maura Delpero
film profile] - competing in the Venice Film Festival - though this time she’s exploring it within a family context. Whilst her first film was set in Argentina within a home for teenage mothers run by nuns, and without a single male figure, the second work by the Bolzano-born director sees her returning home, geographically speaking, with a new story set in Vermiglio, in the mountains of Trentino-South Tyrol, within a community comprising several dozen individuals in the final year of the Second World War. That is, when the person who passed on his memories to her – her father – was just a child.

The film starts in a harsh, snowy winter and follows the life of a large family to the rhythm of the passing of the seasons. The father (Tommaso Ragno) is the only person in the village who has studied: he listens to Chopin and Vivaldi, he’s the teacher at the local school, he’s authoritarian but he teaches the children about beauty in a world of war. He has no patience for his older son, Dino (Patrick Gardner), who’s not interested in learning. His favourite is little Flavia (Anna Thaler), who’s perceptive and strong-willed. Their mother (Roberta Rovelli) is a woman whose beauty has faded after giving birth ten times and following the arduous task of raising children and cows. There’s also little Pietrin, and Ada (Rachele Potrich), who feels overlooked and masturbates behind a wardrobe, as well as a cousin who has run away from the front and who has returned to the village with another deserter, young Sicilian, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), with both of them now hiding in a farm on the mountaintop. The Sicilian falls in love with the eldest sister, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who returns his affections, and, in an especially brilliant scene, he asks her father for her hand in marriage during the weekly lesson the teacher organises for the adults in the village.

Once the war is over, the newly wed is allowed to travel to Sicily to see his family. Months go by without even a letter, and people begin to suspect the young man won’t ever return again. Lucia must bear the stigma of an “abandoned pregnant woman” in a poor, patriarchal society where every new arrival is first and foremost another mouth to feed before becoming an asset. The young woman soon finds herself wrestling with motherhood at a time when it has lost all meaning for her, and she does so with rare determination. The legacy of Ermanno Olmi’s cinema can definitely be felt in this rural world which is coming to an end and in Delpero’s contemplative mise en scène, but the director takes an entirely different approach to observing these young women. The protagonist, Lucia, is a female figure who is already evolving: she goes from being subjugated by a man, having always occupied a secondary role in a chauvinist society, to stepping into the shoes of a woman who undermines obsolete and sexist discrimination and ideologies.

The film’s photography, courtesy of Mikhail Krichman, transports us to modest and closed-off rural settings where we can practically smell the snow, the wood, the wine and the cigarettes smoked in the village’s only tavern, where everyone comes together. The brilliant Tommaso Ragno is the only well-known professional actor in the cast; all the others play their part - speaking the dialect of the valleys - with well-directed spontaneity. The aesthetic rigour of Delpero’s historical reconstruction and the film’s essential dialogue are visually captivating and mentally rousing, but they fail to warm our hearts at moments when pure emotion should dominate.

Vermiglio, The Mountain Bride is an Italian-French-Belgian production by Cinedora in league with RAI Cinema, in co-production with Charades Productions and Versus Production. Charades are managing international sales.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 02/09/2024: Venice 2024 - Vermiglio

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Maura Delpero, Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Orietta Notari
© 2024 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it