A heavy stillness lingers in places where voices are kept low, where lives are anchored in duty and tradition rather than choice. Watching Vermiglio (2024), Maura Delpero’s sophomore feature, set in the remote Italian Alps at the close of World War II, I felt the presence of that weight, though I was worlds away from it. The film’s narrative orbits the Graziadei household, where Cesare, the father of nine -soon to be ten- children, presides as the family leader, his authority shaping the lives of the women and children under his roof while extending beyond the home as, perhaps, the only educated figure in this secluded Alpine community. Within this overbearing patriarchal environment, the lives of Vermiglio’s women enact small-scale revolutions while hidden in plain sight. Their struggles both foreign and unexpectedly familiar, reflect how the roles of mother, daughter, and sister intertwine and reveal much about the complexities of the female experience across the different stages of life.
In Vermiglio, what initially appears to be a close-knit family dynamic gradually disintegrates before the viewer’s eyes, as Mikhail Krichman’s lens embraces fragmentation to focus on the women of the Graziadei family. With the war in the background nearing its end, Adele (Roberta Rovelli), the mother, and her three daughters—Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), Ada (Rachele Potrich), and Flavia (Anna Thaler)—tend to the household amidst everyday routines, while engaging in a far more challenging endeavor: discovering themselves. Through the narrative, the writer-director orchestrates a distraction when the wartime present thrusts into their reclusive world, as if the arrival of Pietro, a Sicilian army fugitive, in their small community would be enough to overshadow the fact that Adele has no chair at the family table or that Ada masturbates behind the closet.
As Lucia and Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) grow closer, their swiftly unfolding love story—and the subsequent revelation of his bigamy—remains at the center of the narrative. Yet it is Gianluca Mattei’s deft editing that allows the film to focus on the subtleties of each woman’s life, offering glimpses into the shifting stages of girlhood and womanhood – not always in equal measure, yet leaving none behind. . Adele, reduced to her child-bearing ability, is largely defined by her role as a mother, with much of her presence centered on being pregnant, giving birth, or tending to a newborn—leaving her emotionally distant and disconnected from her other children. ; Lucia, as the eldest daughter and the most likely to follow her mother’s steps and create a household of her own, makes the first move on the man she loves; Ada, plagued by her own self-imposed religious remorse, grapples with her fear of sexuality and queerness; and finally, Flavia, on the verge of adolescence, bears the burden of being her father’s favorite that will have to continue her studies and excel just like he did.
Weaved together, all the above makes up the plurality of womanhood. In the lives of the four characters, this womanhood occasionally, though not inevitably, converges with motherhood, , manifesting in various forms, whether as absence or omnipresence. What oscillates between the two is this maternal ambivalence that the film is mostly preoccupied with;an ambivalence that, while rooted in motherhood, does not rest solely on Adele. It extends across the relationships between her and her children, it burdens Lucia in the early days of her unexpected pregnancy while still not married to Pietro and it weighs on Ada who does everything in her power to fill the gaps her mother cannot bridge. The film captures this relational push and pull, suggesting that maternal ambivalence is not an individual failing, but perhaps a response to systemic pressures.
Hailing from the themes of her first film set in a nun-run refuge for young mothers, Delpero’s human tenderness towards motherhood translates into visual tenderness present within the constraints of Vermiglio and the Graziadei household. Lucia, Ada and Flavia stand on the receiving end of a non-existent maternal care, prompting Krichman’s camera to assume a maternal gaze of its own; it ‘sits’ by the bedside or lingers at the foot of the bed, puts the girls to sleep every single night, and watches over them unassumingly as they whisper their worries away before sleep. Throughout the rest of the time, the cyclical nature of the seasons mirrors the girls’ personal transitions, highlighting the emotional distance between them and Adele. Even when Flavia, the youngest, gets her first period and is visibly frightened by the unfamiliar changes in her body, her mother’s response is a brief gesture—a small cloth handed over with instructions to change it regularly. After this pragmatic exchange, Adele exits the frame, leaving Flavia alone. Yet, the camera lingers, staying a bit longer with Flavia as she grapples with what is ushering her into a world of expectations and responsibilities.
That is not to suggest that this sort of surrogacy embodied by the camera is Delpero’s way of pointing a finger at Adele. Neither does she use Adele as a mere symbol of victimhood; instead, the director’s artistic choices shed light on the often unseen distinction between motherhood and mothering, an idea first articulated in Adrienne Rich’s 1976 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As a mother deeply enmeshed in the patriarchal institution of motherhood, Adele’s ambivalence or absence even is less a personal failure than a testament to the crushing weight of societal expectations that have reduced her to her reproductive role. When we first meet her, she is already pregnant with their ninth child. Soon after, she gives birth, but the newborn’s fragile health eventually claims its life. And as Adele is bound to care for the household, and for the food on the table, she has no time to mourn her lost child. As the seasons shift, she is pregnant once more. In this vicious cycle of reproduction, Adele is robbed of the space to grieve or care for her other children. More importantly, she is denied the opportunity to engage in mother-ing—a process whose notion of ongoing agency is what differentiates it from an already fixed idea of motherhood.
In this typology of maternal ambivalence, Lucia, as the eldest daughter, stands as proof of its inescapable pull. Pietro’s betrayal, his sudden death, her impending role as a single mother, and the villagers’ snarky comments about her doomed youth, all serve to widen the distance between Lucia’s identity as a woman and the soon-to-be single mother. What today might be recognized as early signs of postnatal depression remains, in 1944, a nameless weight, leaving Lucia isolated in her struggle without language or context for her experience. Once again, the camera steps up to provide the care the other female characters cannot. In a telling scene during Lucia’s early days of maternity, little Antonia lies crying on the bed while Lucia cannot bring herself to draw near, let alone hold her. The framing of the scene, a wide angle shot from the corner of the room, emphasizes the vastness of the bed beneath Antonia, and the (emotional) distance between mother and child. Even as the camera closes in on their faces, as if urging a connection, Lucia ultimately exits the room, echoing the way her own mother often withdraws during her interactions with her daughters.
Enter Ada, the middle daughter, who navigates a different emotional terrain in relation to maternity—not yet a mother herself. Throughout the film, she tenderly attends to her mother’s newest baby, stepping in when house chores demand Adele’s attention. With the arrival of Antonia, Ada is often found in the background comforting the infant, quietly absorbing the weight of her sister’s burden. By the end of the film, after Ada has moved to the convent, she once again embraces her role as caretaker for her little niece, unveiling yet another facet of motherhood’s plurality. Now residing in the convent’s nursery, Antonia is cradled in Ada’s care, allowing Lucia to step into her new job at the town, with the comforting knowledge that her baby is in good hands.
In a country where the birth rate declines year after year, and the sanctity of motherhood is deeply woven into the fabric of its Catholic identity, portraying women who may not fully embrace the patriarchal idea of maternal devotion feels quietly subversive. And when Adele closes the shutters of the girls’ bedroom once they have all moved out of the Graziadei household, we know very well that the identities of these women, sisters, daughters, and mothers are no longer confined to the walls of the home, nor to any other home.