CIFF 2024: Vermiglio, The Sparrow in the Chimney, Super Happy Forever

While lighter fare is always appreciated, I expect most films I watch at festivals to be bleak and heavy. It’s sobering and heartening to see the ways creatives try to make sense of the world’s cruelties, from familial dysfunction to the loss of loved ones (to name a few recurring adversities). Such films feel all the more appropriate at CIFF, as the end of the fest also marks a transition where the coziness of Fall begins to morph into the harsher chill of Winter. The films in this dispatch capture that disarming metamorphosis from effervescence and beauty to a deeper darkness that lurks under the surface. 

Director Maura Delpero’s “Vermiglio,” which won the top prize, the Gold Hugo, at the festival, earns encomium for how it renders frigid temperatures at high altitudes intimate and inviting. The very earliest moments that Delpero documents are those of the family’s daily rhythms and activities: milking the cow, preparing meals, and doing laundry. There’s affection and insurance in these movements; these actions sustain the community and bring joy. Knowing how to move forward when these activities are interrupted will become a key tribulation for the family and underscores one of the film’s main themes about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Taking place during the closing moments of World War II, the main characters of the film are three sisters: Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), Ada (Rachele Potrich, and Flavia (Anna Thaler). When Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian soldier who has fled the war, comes into town, he and Lucia strike up a romance. This change in rhythm allows breaking free and imagining a new reality for everyone in various degrees. At the same time, the sisters’ father (Tommaso Ragno) tries his best to keep his stern and iron grip on his family. 

As “Vermiglio” waders in its conclusion, it grounds its many ideas, from the ways religious indoctrination can limit people’s ability to dream to how those whose countries are at war can never quite escape its influence no matter how isolated they may be, through the frequent return back to showing the family’s routine. This keeps the film from getting lost in the weeds of all it tries to convey; Delpero’s film is quiet in depicting change but basks in the incremental disruptions that can change and disrupt the status quo of power. This is especially evoked in how she frames this community as a people both strengthened by the beauty around them and constrained. As we see Lucia, Ada, and Flavia work the land, we see how small they are to the vastness of the nature around them. There’s a contentment rooted in the comfort of family, but they also want to break free.

Less of a portrait of familial dysfunction and more a dispatch from the front lines of a household at war with itself, Ramon Zürcher’s “The Sparrow in the Chimney” is a film dipped in venom, often funny and deeply unsettling in how it portrays families who don’t feel the need to hide their vitriol behind pleasantries. Taking place over a weekend, two sisters, Karen (Maren Eggert) and Jule (Britta Hammelstein) come together to celebrate Karen’s husband, Markus’ (Andreas Döhler), birthday. In between various meals, dance parties, and pool time, the tumultuous relationship between Karen and her three children, the eldest, Christina (Paula Schindler), high schooler Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss), and the youngest, Leon (Ilja Bultmann) threatens to undo the fragile peace. Though it is to various degrees, Christina, Johanna, and Leon can’t hide their disdain for their mother and Zürcher rakes the audience through the shards of their fractured relationship, pushing the limits of how many scenes of cringe behavior and social awkwardness we can take. 

Karen is not at all blameless as she frequently orders her children around, belittles them, and treats them more as servants than her own children. At the start of the film, her kids, particularly the fiery Johanna, spar with their mother and sneak verbal jabs in between pleasantries so as not to make the time awkward for Jule, her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy) and their daughter Edda (Luana Greco), their battles quickly become more intense. At the same time, Jule and Karen have their grievances with each other while Markus unsuccessfully tries to keep his affair with the family’s dog walker, Liv (Luise Heyer), hidden. As we witness all these misgivings and secrets collide first in hushed whispers and then in verbal and physical spats, Döhler crafts an unforgiving tale of what happens when vices dance with abandon.

Much of the dark humor comes from how matter-of-fact (and violent) the dialogue is, particularly from parents to their children. “Don’t think I love you just because you’re my mother,” Johanna says at one point to Karen; it’s probably the tamest interaction the two hold, one that cuts far deeper when said nonchalantly than if it was shouted. Zürcher also creates a palpable sense of claustrophobia in the otherwise beautiful house where the family has gathered, disrupting this illusion of safety and privacy. There are many moments where characters privately disclose their emotions or feelings about another family member to each other, only to reveal the person they’re speaking about standing and watching them outside the frame.

While roughly the first half of the film revels in seeing the ways the family members wound each other (or the animals and neighbors who dare cross them), the latter half transitions into a more fantastical and lucid exploration of angst, a choice that further underscores how the rage and frustrations family members cause each other is simultaneously metaphysical and embodied; the feelings conjured are almost otherworldly. It is in these sequences, where characters give in to their hallucinations, visions, and desires that Zürcher composes some of his most unsettling images (sorry, “Tenet” and “Evil Dead Rise,” but there’s a sequence involving a cheese grater that’s far gorier and toe-curling than the ones in those films). 

Then there’s “Super Happy Forever,” arguably the lightest of the three but one whose glow radiates from a painful center. Director Kohei Igarashi splits his narrative between two timelines, 2023 and 2018, and the film seamlessly moves back and forth between them. In the present day, Sano (Hiroki Sano) travels with his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) to the Japanese coastal town of Izu, where in 2018, Sano met and fell in love with his late wife, Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto). In those in-between years, the pandemic has taken its toll on a hotel that held much significance to both Sano and Nagi, and Sano decides to check into the hotel for old time’s sake, hoping the act will bring back memories and a renewed sense of purpose even while he struggles with his grief. In between Sano’s moments of recollection, Igarashi tells the story of how Sano and Nagi fell in love, their meet-cute and relational developments always tinged with an aura of tragedy, given that viewers know the destination of their romantic journey. 

Igarashi’s structure highlights and saturates moments with a complex array of emotions beyond what’s just on the surface. He favors framing that renders the characters as small and minor in comparison to the vastness of the beauty around them; as Sano walks back and forth on the same coastline, the shots evoke a sense of determination and agony; he’s alone in his grief, and yet there’s much beauty around him that he subsequently misses if he remains solely defined by his tragedy.

“Super Happy Forever” whimsically shows how memories are as much in our bodies as they are in our minds and how visiting certain places again acts as portals for a richer understanding than musing on things in our heads. It urges us not to be afraid of losing our experiences to time. Our memories are like the waves that crash against the coast: gone for a moment, but then here in the next.