"The Fiances" - Ermanno Olmi (1963)

Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi has seen himself more as a craftsman than as an intellectual.  As such, he is different from the typically judgmental writer/author and more like (most of) us – he is a perceiver immersed in the complexity of the world surrounding him.  We generally don’t emphatically act in the clearly defined fashions of the actors that we usually see in films. Olmi evidently understands this, and what distinguishes him from and above most other filmmakers is his ability to tell his cinematic stories in a more naturalistic fashion – closer to the way we ourselves experience the world.  For this reason Olmi is often classified as a Italian Neorealist (and indeed Vittorio de Sica was one of his major influences), but there is a subtle difference.  The Neorealists tended to aim at capturing the “objective” life of ordinary people, as if they were documentarians.  But Olmi (who admittedly was originally a documentary filmmaker) has a way of presenting the world as it is existentially experienced by his characters.  This makes his films less objective, but more authentic.

The Fiances (I Fidanzati, 1963) was Olmi’s third film, following the marvelous Il Posto (1961), and it bears some similarities with its predecessor.  Both films follow the experiences of an ordinary young worker as he tries to adapt himself to a new job and social circumstances.  And both films have overtones concerning the dehumanizing aspects of work life that was becoming standard in modern postwar capitalism.  But The Fiances is not really so much concerned with sociopolitical commentary as it is with something more basic.

The story concerns the small joys and woes of a young Italian couple, the fiances, who have been engaged to be married for some time.  This was common in Italy for years after World War II because of the severe housing shortage that the war had created.  Even fifteen years after the war, there was a significant shortage of adequate housing, and so young couples often had to wait for some time before they could find a suitable apartment to move into and commence married life [1]. This long time of waiting could wear off the bloom of early romantic love.  For the couple in this story, further stress is placed on their relationship by the unhappy prospects of their being separated for some time due to work commitments.

Actually in some respects there doesn’t even seem to be much of a story at all in The Fiances.  That is truly a magical aspect of Olmi’s films in general.  They seem merely to feature only a random sequence of trivial incidents that don’t appear to have a meaningful connection to a coherent narrative.  And yet the cumulative experience of watching these incidents leads to something of an epiphany about life and love.  That is what happens here in The Fiances, and it testifies to Olmi’s extraordinary skill in weaving a meaningful tapestry out of these various scattered elements.

The narrative structure, such as it is, has roughly four sections to it that describe what happens to the two main characters, Giovanni (played by Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi).  The focalization of the film is almost entirely on Giovanni throughout.

1 The Departure

The film opens on a local dance hall in Milan where Giovanni and Liliana evidently habitually go for their social life.  The atmosphere of the dance hall is tacky and tasteless, as if all the people have been coming to this joint too many times, and it is now just a bad habit.  The live music that is played by the hired pianist and accordionist has a rather shabby organ-grinder feel to it, but this music persists in the mind of Giovanni and becomes the main musical theme of the film.

At the dance hall, it is evident that Giovanni and Liliana are out of sorts and barely speaking to each other.  This scene is interspersed with a number of flashbacks that provide the background for why the couple is at odds.  Giovanni has received a job-transfer offer that he cannot afford to refuse.  He is a blue-collar welder, and the job offer is a chance to get a pay raise and promotion by spending a year-and-a-half at a construction site in Sicily, several hundred miles to the south. As a proper young woman, Liliana cannot go with Giovanni to Sicily, so it means that they will be separated for a long time.  So naturally Liliana thinks that this will mean an end to their marriage engagement. As he is ready to depart, the quarrel is still not settled, and this section ends with Giovanni on a plane south to Sicily.

2 Arrival in Sicily

In this section the social isolation of Giovanni is clear.  He arrives in Sicily in the evening and checks into a hotel room where he will stay for a few days until he can find a more permanent residence.  Then he has a lonely dinner in the mostly empty hotel restaurant. Giovanni is a taciturn working-class person who listens more than he talks. At work at the construction site the next day, he observes a fellow worker is seriously injured and rushed away in an ambulance.  His foreman tells him that the local Sicilian workers don’t have an adequate work ethic: accustomed to the seasonal work of agricultural workers, they even fail to come to work on rainy days.

3 Giovanni at Leisure
But there are non-working days, too, and Giovanni explores the local area.  He has some time on his own, but again, he is always alone and has no new friends.  He walks into a local church and sits alone piously at a pew in the back.  When a dog enters the church and disrupts a pastoral session for some children, the children all giggle, and Giovanni is amused too.  This is the first time that we see him smile, but he is still alone.

On the bus to the construction site, Giovanni overhears his fellow transfer workers dismissively gossip about the pathetically peasant attitudes of the local Sicilians. 

He later goes to a raucous local street festival which features women dressed in festival masks who are thereby permissibly able to dance with strangers on the crowded square.  Giovanni dances with one such woman, who offers him a kiss but won’t take off her mask.  The festive spirit leads to general drunkenness, and back at the hotel Giovanni even gets into some rowdy pranks with some of the other tenants.

During sections 2 and 3 of the story, Giovanni occasionally has flashback memories of his life in Milan – one associated with this parting argument with the inconsolable Liliana and another one when he danced at the dance hall with a sexy girl with whom he had apparently had a brief affair.  So he is trying to immerse himself in the new surroundings, and maybe drifting away from Liliana.

4 Memories
Giovanni moves out of the hotel he had been staying at and into a barren little hostel room that will be his more permanent accommodation for his time in Sicily. But memories of Liliana keep coming back. He remembers his affair with the sexy Milanese girl and how it had hurt Liliana. And he remembers Liliana’s quiet suffering in response and her quitet heartfelt reaffirmation of her love for him. Now he begins to remember her more fondly. They begin to exchange letters, and this begins the most beautiful part of the film that shines a meaningful light on everything that has come before.  The normally taciturn Giovanni opens up as the letters are read aloud in voiceover:

“Why haven’t you written?  I sent my postcard two weeks ago and still no answer from you. . . . My regards to everyone and a kiss for you.”

Liliana responds that she was afraid to open his letter, fearing that it would be a “good-bye” letter from him:

“I hesitated to write back. . I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” . . .
“I had lost faith and hope as well.”

As they exchange more letters, we learn that a couple of months have now passed.  The growing tenderness is conveyed by showing Liliana on camera speaking her letters aloud.  She says she doesn’t go dancing anymore, because he is no longer there to dance with her.

“I tried to forget you, to erase you from my thoughts.  But now, thank goodness, everything has changed.”

For his part, Giovanni’s words for her become tender and soulful, as he expresses his ardour for her.  He goes out and swims happily in the ocean, and we know that he is thinking of her.

At the film’s end, it is Sunday and a storm is brewing outside.  Giovanni spontaneously rings up Liliana on the phone and speaks to her. She is alarmed and wonders what’s wrong, but he says he called just because he was thinking of her.  With ominous thunder sounding outside, he speaks tenderly to her for a few minutes, and then hangs up as a torrential downpour with heavy winds drowns the countryside at the close of the film.

The storm at the end of The Fiances is a brilliant touch on the part of Olmi and accentuates the strong emotional feelings at the close.  A number of critics have viewed this closing storm as an indication that the affair between Giovanni and Liliana is either threatened or doomed to die of ennui (for example, [2,3]).  I don’t think so.  To me the storm merely emphasizes their sense of being apart and their vulnerability to external forces.  It shows how powerless they are in the face of exigencides that arise out of the wild, natural world out there, but it does not diminish their longing for each other – it brings greater attention and urgency to it.

The acting on the part of Carlo Cabrini and  Anna Canzi is superb.  They were not professional film actors prior to The Fiances, although they did appear in a few films thereafter. They both effectively portray basically inarticulate working-class people, but they convey magnitudes in their facial expressions, especially Ms. Canzi.

Overall, I am still amazed at the way Olmi does it – the way he stitches together the various mundane depictions of his protagonists’ surroundings so that they convey a sense of melancholy and reflection. And then he turns things around so that loneliness brings awareness and longing for the departed soulmate. This is not just operating according to the realism mythology of going out and find ordinary "real" people and then photographing them. This involves carefully staged theatrics, handling of actors, image composition, and editing. For me, this is closer to the authentic reality of our conscious existence. By doing this he constructs a nuanced inner narrative that conveys his message. The film's narrative movement is epitomized by the musical soundtrack. The "organ-grinder" accordion music theme in the beginning seemed sleazy and cheap, but it gradually comes to symbolize all the times that Giovanni and Liliana were together at the dance hall. While in those earlier times they had gotten into the habit of taking each other for granted, they have later come to look back at those times as wonderful moments that they shared.  And so the accordion theme at the end becomes a beautiful aural motif for their now-recognized true love.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Paul F. Wendt , “Post World-War-II Housing Policies in Italy”, Land Economics, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1962), pp. 113-133.
2.  Bill Gibron, “Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - I Fidanzati (1963)”, Popmatters, (19 December 2006). 
3. Kent Jones, “Rhapsody in the Rain”, The Criterion Collection, (23 June, 2003).

"Il Posto" - Ermanno Olmi (1961)

Ermanno Olmi started as an industrial filmmaker before launching his career in feature films, and he has always continued to use the raw materials of documentary film production: non-professional actors and the natural settings and environment of the everyday world. As a consequence, his work has often been viewed in the light of Italian Neorealism, even though it was always going to be difficult to confine Neorealism’s early adherents within its somewhat problematic conceptual boundaries. In fact by the time Olmi came onto the scene in the late 1950s, Neorealism’s patriarchs, such as Roberto Rosellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio de Sica, had moved off in very different directions, and the “movement” had lost its steam. But it was to be revived with Olmi’s second feature, Il Posto, (The Job, aka The Sound of the Trumpets, 1961), which seemed to breathe new life into the Neorealistic attitude (and it is sustained today by the work of some Iranian filmmakers, notably Jafar Panahi). (Note: for further discussion on Italian Neorealism, see "Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan" and "Subjective Realism in the Italian Film".)

But Olmi’s Il Posto is much more than just a Neorealist film. Like de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Olmi’s Il Posto transcends the dimensions of Neorealism and stands as one of the great and universal films of any era. Indeed, it is fitting, then, that Olmi cites de Sica as an important influence on his work. There are several factors that contribute to the virtues of Il Posto – the cinematic craftsmanship, the affecting and natural acting, and the compelling narrative, itself, which is not just about particular people at a particular time, but about the very nature of modern life.

The story of the film is set in postwar Milan, but it concerns the disruptive changes that were altering life all over the world after the war. The war itself, of course, was cataclysmic and disruptive, but with peacetime, large-scale capitalism was spreading around the globe and leading to vast changes in the way people live and socialise. We are still living in the middle of this disruptive evolutionary cultural process of “globalization”, which is a new term for something that got into full gear after the end of the Second World War. Our culture and our attitudes are still catching up to the impact and consequences that global capitalisation (perhaps more effectively termed “Predatory Capitalism” – see the current work of economist James K. Galbraith) is engendering. There are four main narrative sections to the story, none of which fully come to closure and leave the viewer at the end with a thoughtful feeling of openness and missed opportunities.

1. Romance.
The first section, of about 34 minute, depicts the hopes and uncertainties of Domenico, a 19-year-old boy from a working-class family who has left “middle school” and is looking for his first job. He takes the train to the big city, Milan, hoping to get an office job at a large company, which if he gets it, his family assures him, will provide him secure employment “for life”. But Domenico, like all young boys, is not really prepared for the workaday world of employment, and doesn’t really know what to expect. He is sensitive and watchful, trying to make a good impression, without know what he really wants – or even what he should want.

When he arrives at the company, he and a large number of other applicants are asked to take various aptitude and personality tests which will be used to determine who gets a job offer. During the lunch break, Domenico meets a pretty young fellow applicant, Atonietta, and they strike up a friendly conversation. Clearly Domenico is very attracted to the lovely girl, but he is naturally shy – a trait that seems to appeal to the girl. Since they have some time before they must return, they go window-shopping in the city. On the way back to the office, they realise that they are late, and they start to run through the streets to get back on time. Domenico takes Antonietta’s hand to help her steer through the chaotic traffic, and soon their hand-holding is delicately portrayed for what it is – an affectionate gesture between the tentative youngsters in search of romance.

After they complete the rest of the “application” day at the company, Domenico meets Antonietta again, and he walks her to her bus stop, and their beautiful tryst ends. The day of uncertainty has ended full of excitement and high hopes.

2. Introduction to the Work World.
Soon it is clear that Domenico has been offered a job by the company. He is outfitted with a new coat and sent off to the train to report for his first day. Not long after he arrives, he happily learns that Antonietta has been offered a job, too. But Domenico is assigned to work in a building different from Antonietta’s, as an assistant office messenger until a desk job opens up. It is soon clear that there is almost nothing for the two office messengers in that building to do, so they just sit at their desks in the corridor outside an office room, whiling away the time. Even when they are assigned to deliver a message, his senior partner, Sartori, advises him cynically not to hurry – make them wait. This section lasts about 18 minutes and shows the intimidating and confusing nature of his new company and position.

3. Isolated, Meaningless Work.
This third section depicts life inside the office room close to Domenico’s desk. There are two rows – four desks in a row – with individuals apparently doing utterly boring, meaningless paperwork. All of these office workers are introduced: the poorly-sighted “Sleepyhead”, the loud worker, the cigarette smoker, the quiet matron, the mother of some grown-up boys, etc. This is then followed by a series of dissolves that move from one vignette to another depicting the squalid circumstances of these people in their private lives. They are all isolated and essentially lonely, cut off from the kind of genuine companionship and interaction that we would find worthwhile. When we cut back to Sartori and Domenico (the next day?), they observe a former office worker who has been retired for three months, but who comes to the office every day and sits in a chair, doing nothing. The man apparently has nothing else to do.

After work, Domenico waits in the rain for Antonietta, but he sees her leave in the company with a number of people, including a well-dressed young man who is holding an umbrella for her. So Domenico watches them depart in silence.

4. Empty Socialising.
Domenico finally runs into Antonietta one day at work, and she asks him to come to the company New Year’s Eve Dance. Domenico does manage to come and finds himself in a large lineoleum-floored room full of tables in front of a bandstand. The room gradually fills with company workers, but Antonietta never shows up. Instead, we watch people engaging in artificial and empty socialising, with little motivation other than to become inebriated. They do become convivial, but it seems garish and forced. These are people that are to be Domenico’s comrades “for life”.

The next day at the office, the office workers are shown standing mournfully around Sleepyhead’s desk. He has passed away, and now Domenico has been assigned his desk. The film ends with Domenico having joined the ranks of the “desks in a row” group, sitting in the rear and commencing his task of boring, meaningless paperwork.

What makes Il Posto poignant is the way it shows how the sincere and innocent Domenico is led relentlessly into the depressing jaws of mind-numbing corporate mechanics. He, too, seems to be doomed to a life of empty, seemingly pointless activity, with little opportunity for meaningful interaction or engagement. Domenico and Antonietta never make the real connection, and presumably that romantic opportunity is lost. Domenico is overwhelmed by the sheer inertia of implacable company minutia. And yet, the entire narrative is presented with a certain good-natured resignation. It is this irony which makes the film stand out. Domenico is like us. He tries to make his way as best he can, and to a certain extent he succeeds. But the rattling noise of the mimeograph machine which grows louder and louder at the close of the film reminds us of what Domenico must feel: there has to be something more than this.

The acting in the film is exceptional throughout. Most of the actors never appeared in any other films. The story probably reflects some of Olmi’s experiences when he worked as an office worker. But on that occasion, at least, he didn’t let his opportunities pass away -- he married actress Loredana Detto, who plays the beautiful Antonietta.

The camera work is also outstanding. Olmi essentially shoots the films he makes, himself, which distinguishes him from other filmmakers. He sees himself more as a craftsman than as an intellectual. It was interesting to me that in an interview, Olmi mentioned that, by contrast, Fellini, whose visual sensibility I admire, never, ever looks through the viewfinder of the camera. One fine example of fluid and unobtrusive camerawork is a 75-second tracking shot in the first section, showing Domenico and Antonietta walking together after their testing day. It is beautifully and delicately shot, as the two of them seem not to know what to do with their hands, after their hand-holding experience earlier in the day. The scenes of the office and of the industrial construction site capture, in a natural way, a mood of relentless and overwhelming mechanics. What is particularly adroit is the way Olmi manages the tempo of the scenes in just the right way, with various extended pauses, cutaways, and point-of-view shots showing Domenico’s reactions to the bewildering world of corporate life.

All told, the four sequences of Il Posto, with their sense of openness and of expectation, leave us with a sense of questioning. It is the same look of questioning that we saw and understood on the face of James Dean in some of his films. Even though we cannot articulate it, there is something that we, too, felt with Domenico when he was with Antonietta – something we must not lose track of, something important, something beautiful out there.
★★★★