Vermiglio review – secrets and lies in idyllic Italian village in the shadow of war

Maura Delpero’s beautifully-made drama explores the complex dynamics of a sprawling family near the wartime border with Germany

Maura Delpero’s new film was a richly deserving winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Venice film festival this year and will now be a jewel of the selection at Toronto and anywhere else on the festival circuit. It is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets in the wartime Italian countryside, in the manner of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers. It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

The setting is the remote Alpine village of Vermiglio in 1944. Cesare is the village schoolteacher whose wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is continually pregnant: he is a white-haired, bespectacled man of fierce standards who also runs an adult literacy class and whose prestige in the community equals and exceeds that of the priest. Cesare is played by Tomasso Ragno, looking in Hollywood terms like a cross between Christopher Plummer and Sam Elliott, with innumerable sons and daughters, of whom Dino (Patrick Gardner) is the sulky ne’er-do-well whose mediocrity and drinking pains him.