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Unless I missed something, which is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, Vermiglio is set towards the end of World War Two….or should that be World War One? I was quite sure about the former as I watched this sombre Italian movie, but as I reflected upon it after the event, I was not so sure. Sometimes it can be a surprise how close to us the past is; sometimes a surprise how far away the recent.
What I was and am sure about is that it doesn’t really matter which war is fizzing away in the background. The issues it deals with would be as .relevant to today were it set at any time from the Renaissance onwards, and precious little of the visuals, less of the dialogue would need to be changed. For this is a story of repression, suppression, and depression within a rural family, living in a rural community in the mountains. It doesn’t really matter, as far as I could see, which mountains they were, or even, dare I say, that it is an Italian family. The issues they are dealing with, of honour, loyalty, paternity, marriage, motherhood, and, centrally, childhood, must resonate with all cultures over all time.
There’s something mean-spirited about this family, yet at the same time it cares for itself and its people. The film is a slow burn story, and I don’t think I was the only one in the audience at Caldbeck Area Film Society who felt, right from the beginning, that it was going to end badly. In fact, it’s subtly redemptive, though not in a revolutionary, liberating way. It’s more to do with endurance and resilience than with changing anything, not least the way these villagers live, under the weight of their social and personal expectations and beliefs.
The scenery, through winter and into summer, is magnificent. The establishing shots, of mountain and forest, and faces, make it worth watching. In one short, full-frame portrait, the transformation of a character is in that face, and the moment tells its own story.
That war, by the way, whichever it is, or was, intrudes only obliquely, and perhaps not surprisingly reminds me of the Bates’ essays on wartime Kent that I blogged about a few weeks ago.
It’s an incredibly slow film in some ways, yet the story is developing. It’s not a whizz bang movie. How could it be? It’s about how people think and feel about each other, about themselves and about God. It’s a claustrophobic one too, despite those wide sweeps of the mountainside. There are more scenes in the bedroom, where the children of the large family discuss what is happening around them than. you might expect to see in the average porn movie (if there is such a thing).
Chatting afterwards it was apparent that audience opinions were divided. The slow development of the story frustrated some; others not so. I found it absorbing, though I was aware of how little seemed to be going on. Slow stories demand attention, but risk distraction. They require enough to ponder in each slow pan, montage and shot to hold our attention until the next one: and they demand an audience prepared and able to make that sort of commitment, to pay that attention, to care; to imagine, perhaps what it must be like to be there, dressed like that, felling and thinking as those characters do.
One small sequence near the beginning gives a clue to the way the story will be told, in a prolonged, unhurried close-up shot under the arm of the mother as she ladles hot milk into a variety of mugs held out, one by one, by her children, each child’s cupped hands and a sliver of body profile seen, each slightly larger than the one before, until the whole family has been fed. By the end of that sequence you’ll know, I suspect, whether you’re going to enjoy it, or count the hours until you can get away!
Some time ago I watched (at Caldbeck Film Society – see them on Fb) The Eight Mountains, an Italian film from 2022.
It’s difficult to know how to frame a review – if you’ve seen it you don’t need telling what to look for – or for that matter a preview – if you’re going to see it you don’t want to be prejudiced in favour or otherwise!
The best film reviewers, I guess, write to some extent about something else, but convince you they’re telling you about the film. As the name suggests there’s scenery aplenty in this movie, and it’s beautifully shot. But that’s not all there is to it, a slow-burn story is being told.
The film is spoken in Italian, and we watched it with subtitles. I have a few words of Italian (sometimes in the right order), and I was listening out for them, not always successfully. But I came away feeling that the story was being told very much in the visuals of the movie, which is, perhaps, as it should be. Alpine, and other mountain scenes were fantastico! (as they say).
Without giving too much away, I can tell you that it’s a tale of two boys, told by one of them, partly in voice-over (which I’ve heard and seen described as ‘killing’ a movie, but which I’ve heard, and seen, work very well in several, as it does here), and it moves at a leisurely pace over several decades of their lives.
Among the storytelling techniques there was, for me, one particularly satisfying moment, without voice over or dialogue, at least as I recall, where a fundamental piece of information about one of the characters is revealed, not by what’s said, or for that matter done, but simply in the way he is dressed. Like the mot juste of a short story (or even a novel), this little scene with its un, rather than merely under-stated detail offers us a turning point in our understanding of that character, and through that of the other characters also. It’s a great piece, not only of storytelling, but of trust-placing by the director in our levels of perception. It’s the sort of ‘it’s there if you want it’ moment that makes stories, however they are told or shown, worth our attention.
When my writing buddy, Nick Dowson, drove me down to Trieste, in the cataclysmic year of 2016 our mission was to seek out the statue of author James Joyce. It was a literary pilgrimage that had been a decade and more in the not-quite-planning, and an excuse for crossing the home continent twice, taking in Heidelberg, Venice, Grenoble and Amiens on our way out and back.
I’ve written about our encounter with JJ earlier in the blog, and also, I think, I mentioned another encounter, not at all planned, with a writer I’d not even heard of.
The statute of Joyce shows a dreamy character, becalmed rather than paused on a bridge over the city’s Grand Canal. He looks to me, to borrow a phrase from Ulysses, ‘a balmy bollocks’ (or should that be ‘barmy’?).
Either way, the surprise for us was to find another ,life sized, statue round the corner and one, that to my mind, seemed to show a much more switched on, ‘together’ character, striding rather forcefully, despite his walking stick, and with the collar of his long coat turned up against a wind that whips its hem. That wind, I like to think, is the one that blew off the long, old stone pier of the Mole Audace while we were there.
I’d never heard of Umberto Saba, and had to look him up on our return. A poet, and antiquarian bookseller, he was born in Trieste in 1883 and died not far away in 1957.
This morning (as I write), some 140 years after his birth (and on my 73rd birthday), the Carcanet edition of editor and translator Patrick Worsnip’s 100 Poems Umberto Saba turned up among my presents! With a useful Preface by Angela Leighton, and Worsnip’s own Afterword and Notes, this is a great collection…. And has whetted my appetite for an attempt on Canzoniere, the collected poems in the original Italian!
My Italian is perfunctory and patchy – I wanted to read the short stories of Giovanni Verga, and Cesare Zavattini’s Toto il Buono (not yet translated into English as far as I know) – but it’s the music that’s always missing in translation it seems to me, and we can sometimes get an echo of that even when our grasp of the language is poor where meaning is concerned. A winter season of Italian lessons, just before Covid gave me a head start in how to pronounce – and there’s plenty online to listen to that helps with those rhythms. Worth a go, anyway, I’d say!
I didn’t get a photo of Saba, so here’s one of Mr Joyce.!
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