Baby Machines: Delpero Designs Tapestry of Women’s Miseries During WWII Italy
Despite the associations suggested by its title, Maura Delpero’s sophomore film Vermiglio is a rather cold, calculating, rigid portrait of an isolated mountain village in Italy at the tail end of WWII. While the title is the name of the small community, made up almost entirely of women, children, and the aging men who were too old for military service, in English it means ‘vermillion,’ a scarlet hue used to describe lips as well as a toxic pigment produced by a chemical reaction between mercury and sulfide (not to mention its representation as a bird symbol in Chinese mythology).… Read the rest
