by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Giuseppe De Domenico
Intro:
… a painterly quality that’s very easy on the eye.
Broadly based on actual events in the writer-director’s family history, this is a downbeat saga, set in a small village in the Italian alps in 1944. World War Two being still under way, the possibility of German troops arriving provides an element of largely unspoken tension. But tension — along with frustration, sadness, guilt and other negative feelings — is the name of the game here. The focus is on one particular family, who are poor and (like everyone else in their community) conditioned and repressed by the dictates of the Catholic Church. The father Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) is a rather dislikeable schoolteacher, and his wife and many children lead lives of predominantly quiet resignation.
Things improve a bit however, and become considerably more animated, with the arrival in the village of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian army deserter. He and the eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) fall in love, she falls pregnant, and they get married. (Hence the film’s subtitle, “The Mountain Bride”.) Eventually, of course, the war ends. There’s one great plot development at around this point in the story, but that would be telling …
The alpine setting is gorgeous, especially during the snowy winter scenes.
Vermiglio isn’t bad, but it’s slow moving and overlong. It does become more involving as we start to care about the characters and their little ‘world’, particularly the relationships between the three daughters. It should only be seen on the big screen, because it has a painterly quality that’s very easy on the eye. (Shades of Vermeer, to be precise.) There’s a downside to that too though, because paintings are like stills and can take the ‘motion’ out of motion picture.
