Maura Delpero on the Painterly, Pastoral Beauty of ‘Vermiglio’

Filmmakers may say that a project came to them in something like a vision, but Maura Delpero means it literally. Vermiglio, Italy’s shortlisted official submission for the best international feature Oscar, originated from a vivid dream in which she claims her recently departed father handed her a story. Delpero took this vision as a point of departure and brought it into reality, fleshing out a diffuse family saga with precise, painterly visuals.

In her father’s eponymous village nestled within the Italian Alps, Delpero plays out a year in the life of a community in a mosaic-like fashion. Vermiglio is a war film, albeit one where the battles take place on a psychological rather than a physical terrain. While their remote geography insulates them from the immediacy of World War II, the conflict reaches the homefront with two deserting soldiers entering the town. When one falls in love with the daughter of the local schoolteacher, the tragedy befalling the European continent becomes unavoidable for the town.

I spoke with Delpero ahead of Vermiglio’s stateside release. Our talk covered how she tied the various threads of the ensemble together, why it was important to structure the film around still shots, and what she hopes spending time in this bygone era offers to modern viewers.

Given the origins of this story in your family history, how were you thinking about your relationship with nostalgia? Was it something you were trying to avoid?

I don’t know if I would love to live in a world where you can die of cold and hunger or cannot study. And as a woman, you’re so limited! [So] there’s no nostalgia for me, and it’s not a nostalgic postcard. But at the same time, it’s [born out] the wanting and desire to make that world live and to watch it [play out] another time. I felt that it was going away a little bit. In my personal life, it was going away because my father died and my aunts were very old. I was feeling something there—that it was important both privately and also publicly to [keep] them alive. I had the sensation it was a world that still could say a lot of things to us. When I began to write, I realized I had a lot of material inside me that I absorbed in childhood. What you absorb in childhood is really strong because you don’t have any defense, filter, or structure. They were very sensorial souvenirs, so I had the materials to tell the world in the five senses.

Was that childlike point of view something you were trying to capture in the way that you told the story? For example, is that why you don’t provide a lot of exposition or background about the characters or the village?

The fact that it was born out of a dream [involving] my father as a child set the tone of the film. I thought it was interesting to have their point of view because it’s straight, harsh, and sweet. It allowed me to avoid a lot of very informatic dialogues I don’t like. I try to be very practical in the dialogs, and then there’s just this whisper in the film of the children commenting on the life of the adults. I thought it was a nice point of view to have, both very true and powerful. Also, in tragedy, it gives a tone that is more full of life.

You’ve mentioned the four seasons structure also came as part of the dream about your father that started the film. Was it also a way to adjust the audience to a notion of time that is cyclical rather than linear?

I thought that it was important to structure [around] four seasons because the world had another reference of time. A rural world of the high mountains thought and felt the time through the four seasons. It’s not like, “What happens in 20 years?” They depended in such an urgent and necessary way on the four seasons, from the animals to the fields and everything. Your brain was settled in it. For me, it was the right structure to give to that moment in society.

How did you think about Pietro’s role in conjunction with the family? Often in narratives about insular communities, an outsider coming into their group forces them to change or modernize. Here, he’s just absorbed into their fabric. Was that traditional narrative something that factored into your approach?

I wanted to have a film [about] war without war. We feel the war in every deprivation, everything you cannot do, the death of the babies, the people who cannot study, and all these things. But the face of the war is those two soldiers who arrive at the beginning of the film. These empty eyes, this impossibility to talk, they have the tragedy on them.

In reality, what happens to Pietro is that when he arrives, he finds a light in Lucia. The etymology of the name Lucia in Italian is light. He finds a light after the darkness of war. That’s also the humanity of Pietro. He’s not an asshole, just another victim of the war. This young guy was taken away from his family when he was a child and thrown into a war. When he comes back, he finds someone who embraces him and shows that there’s light again. Who wouldn’t understand him? I think he’s the typical character that, as you say, when he arrives in the village, changes things. He also shows different characters in the village that most people are racist who don’t want something new that they don’t understand.

Then there’s the father, who’s both an old patriarch and an open-minded person. He’s the paradox of the film. When the war ends in the macro history, the war arrives in the family, and the family loses its peace through the character of Pietro. Sometimes, tragedy arrives through very innocent characters. It’s not a world with bad or good boys. I think they’re all victims of the war. When [the two soldiers] arrive, they break this apparent peace but not because of being bad. It’s just what happens when life is at war. Everything changes, and everything is broken.

The town functions like a collective protagonist. How did you coordinate all the different moving pieces in the ensemble, practically or philosophically?

Multi-character movies are a big challenge, but I think they’re interesting because they give us more points of view on the same theme and subject. They’re more prismatic and, therefore, give you the possibility to deepen into complexity. A single, dominant point of view is easier to write and also gives the audience the possibility to enter through and empathize with one character. But I think that when you try to tell [the story of] a family, it’s really important to understand that they’re both individuals and part of something bigger. I wrote a lot of versions, working on this idea of the film as a bildungsroman novel in which you turn the page to see what happens to that brother or sister who’s linked to the author. It’s not that you just go away into another thing; they’re part of the same thing. But, of course, you have to manage it.

How did you settle on a style where you create so much meaning in these strikingly composed tableaus without a lot of camera movement or montage?

I was looking for a language that was synthetic and syncretic. When you have the audiovisual tools, it’s really worthwhile to use as few words and as many images as possible. And when you have a lot of details, you have to give the viewer the time to absorb and perceive all the different layers. I didn’t want a frenetic camera; that would be too contemporary for me, and very far away from that more still time. And, also, that type of camera would allow me to use a few planned [shots]. I don’t cover myself with a lot of points of view on the scene. I just decided this one, that one, and I stayed there a little more. You arrive there, and you don’t have to tell things through different shots or scenes. If you count the pans in the film, they are [few] because I prefer to arrive, fix [the camera] there, and use all the syncretic possibilities of an image.

The language tries to be very synthetic and syncretic, and I passed a lot of paintings to the cinematographer [Mikhail Krichman], saying that, of course, we were talking about reality and a word that’s nourished by documentary. But it was still a representation. It was not a documentary camera or aesthetic. It was a painted film for me. Paintings were the main reference. We strongly worked on colors and texture to have the idea of this tableau.

How did you approach the sound design for the film, especially small things like little household details or the planes flying above?

I love to work on “off” [sounds]. I think sometimes the “off” is stronger than the “on.” We worked a lot with direct sound, using nature and outside sounds. And then, inside with these big walls, you’re protecting yourself from this big nature that’s dangerous. This was an idea already there, but we forced it more in the editing room—to have these sound bridges between one scene and the other. There’s anticipation of the sound of the scene that goes into the other one, with the idea that we were talking about a world of relationships and interdependent things. For example, there’s an image of a person and someone commenting on this person. That’s something that happens a lot in big families. Individuals and community are always connected.

I felt that the sound of the film was a silence we don’t know anymore. They speak a specific dialect that has a specific music. All the music in the film is diegetic, from the classical music the father listens from the gramophone. Even if a scene inherits the music, the source is always the gramophone, even when it goes more lyrical. For example, with the Vivaldi, we go to another place, but it comes out of the gramophone. Same thing for the songs. The songs were sung by the same men of the village; it’s a group of men who sing songs in the bars in that village. They were also our extras in the café and church. We worked on this idea that this world already had its sound and its music, and we didn’t have to put more on it. Just having these babies crying, these people working—[it was] all this multi-layered world of sound.

What did you make of the characters’ relation to music? Unlike us, who can pull up any song from our phones right now, it’s more special to them.

The music [the father] listens to are the only [gramophone records] he can afford. I still can remember the gesture of having records and choosing them. This has a meaning for the father, the students, and the daughters. It’s also a way to accede to culture. It’s not just the music, but it’s also the personal story of this musician and what he wanted to say by writing this. Chopin wasn’t a happy person. He fell in love with the wrong person, and so it was metaphorically interesting for the story that there was a love suffering [in the music] too.

And, of course, Vivaldi is the metaphor of the whole film. I never used it to underline emotional moments. It’s a harsh world, but then there are these moments in which you give importance to what you’re listening to. Therefore, there’s this big discussion with the mother [about] whether it’s fair to buy records in wartime. That’s one of the situations [in the film] that I like. Of course, she’s right; they have to get food in order not to be ill. But, at the same time, we’re completely with him in thinking that we would love for our children to go to school and have a teacher who makes them understand that culture can illuminate life in wartime.

The film is full of such evocative details like the music. Where were you sourcing these things, such as taking off a dress to avoid detection of cigarette smoke?

I prepare a lot! I like telling [a story] through details—the idea of something that’s growing little by little. I went a lot to the territory, and I was exposed to all the influences of what I was hearing and touching. Then, I was seeing the photo archive of [my] family a lot, and every photo was something very intimate to me. Some things I knew, and some things I didn’t know because I was a little child. That was the way I interviewed my aunts, saying, “Okay, look at this photo. What happened here? What was there?” You get to know a lot of fantastic details. Other old people in the village tell you a lot of emotional things about their childhood. It was less than 20 degrees, and they didn’t have shoes. You hear this, and you can’t understand this. When [an old man] talks to you, he says, “Yes, under my foot is a natural shoe!” When he’s talking, you imagine his natural shoe, and you say, “Oh!” These things are not in books, of course.

Were you giving that level of detail to the cast so they could inhabit the time or was that already a part of their cultural knowledge since many came from the region?

I really wanted [as much as] possible to cast from the region. Those people, you don’t have to explain anything to them. They were the culture I was inspired by. They lived with this. I didn’t have to tell anything to those men you see in the bar. Those people are stuck in time! They remember now how happy they were when they received a mandarin as children. That was something incredible to receive in the mountain, and they were waiting one year long to receive that one mandarin from Santa Lucia. It’s exactly their life. My work was more to bring the professional actors to them and make them be together as much as possible so that the professional ones could learn from them and absorb their culture.

The origin of this project is looking back to the past of your father. What has Vermiglio given you for the future?

I think that looking back is a very good and important way to look forward. We tend to forget, but remember, that was Italy just two generations [ago], with poor people who had to emigrate and leave everything to come here to the States. Now, Italy is a first-world nation, but that was just my grandmother [living like this]. To me, [Vermiglio] is a possibility to understand better where we are now and where we want to go. It’s a film about the past that makes you reflect on the present and future. Or at least that was my sensation: that the past was still telling us things.

Or, at least, you know, maybe there are ways for urban dwellers to integrate parts of that lifestyle into their own. But maybe not premature death or no shoes.

No, but it questions you! Maybe the answer is just, “Okay, for this thing, it’s much better or enough.” Women’s position, of course, I wouldn’t want to live in a world that doesn’t allow me to have sexual desire. But, then, at the same time, there are other things that you can ask yourself, like “I’m not sure that this is better now.” To me, going to the cinema is entering another planet. I hope this will bring some emotions and reflections home.