I fidanzati

Giovanni is an engineer who leaves his fiancee in the North of Italy for promotion in Sicily but once there finds it very different from what he expected. Like "Il Posto" before it, Ermanno Olmi's masterpiece "I Fidanzati" uses mostly non-professional actors and a documentary-style approach to chronicle the everyday life of ordinary people in, for Giovanni at least, an alien environment. Sicily may as well be the surface of the moon though it does have its own rarefied atmosphere.

Olmi's genius has always been for focusing his gaze on the simple things of life. There are no great dramas going on; some may even find "I Fidanzati" boring and yet there is more truthfulness and beauty here than most films can only dream of. I could watch Giovanni drift through his less than exciting life until the cows come home and Carlo Cabrini's 'non-performance' as Giovanni is quietly magnificent, perfectly in keeping with Olmi's vision of the man. Not as highly thought of as "Il Posto" but just as fine, "I Fidanzati" is one of the greatest of Italian films and, sadly, one of the most underrated.

Carlo Cabrini gets a chance for a big promotion. The catch is he'll have to move to Sicily for eighteen months. He's worried about his decrepit father, and his fiancee, Anna Canzi is sulky. When he arrives in Sicily, he finds it foreign and oddly noisy and the people strange and greedy and annoying, but as time goes on, he begins to grow accustomed to its rhythms and his strange dreams the lack of a letter from Miss Canzi. Then a letter arrives....

Ermanno Olmi's ultimately very romantic movie is, when you come down to it, standard studio fare. There were hundreds, if not thousands of movies like it made and still being made. Even so, Olmi's script leaves the outcome in doubt through the end and the cinematography by Lamberto Caimi offers us Sicily first as a terrible and alien landscape that grows warm and home-like is a very seductive fashion. It's a well-told tale.

This was Olmi's 3rd feature and was shown briefly in New York (audiences failed to turn out even when they were giving tickets away). It's a step forward in Olmi's artistry, after the straightforward but delightful realism of "Il Posto." Olmi uses temporal devices to elaborate the circumstances of the hero's lonely life - his long engagement, his decision to take a job offer in faraway Sicily, his longing for Liliana - and succeeds brilliantly, achieving a more artful and truly poetic style. And anyone who has spent some time far away from a loved one will feel acutely Giovanni's isolation and how his feelings for Liliana become clearer and sharper as the days that separate them accumulate. I unhesitatingly recommend this beautiful little film.

A nice, small film much in the vein of Olmi's earlier Il posto, which was one of the best films I saw in 2012. The film follows an engaged couple (the title translates to The Fiances). The man (Carlo Cabrini) accepts a post in a far-away factory for an extended period of time, leaving his fiancée (Anna Canzi) home alone. There's not much to it plotwise. It's kind of a mood piece, as the two experience life apart, trying to enjoy it but not really being able to. It's quite lovely, but, I have to say, I didn't really connect to it emotionally anywhere near the level that I did with Il posto. I can see viewers reacting similarly to Il posto, because that, too, was a very small, simple, short film. In some ways, I thought that this felt kind of like Olmi was trying to recapture the mood of Il posto but didn't entirely succeed. Still, it's worthwhile.

The love of a worker for his fiancée is rekindled after a long separation. The poor state of the economy in Sicily and the upheaval of its industry provides the backdrop to this touching love story. Somewhat drawn out and clumsy, however.