Il posto

I encountered this film almost accidentally one evening, and was not expecting a lot from it. Certainly, I had no way of knowing in advance what I was in for. With relative indifference I sat down, pressed play, and ended up experiencing one of the greatest movie experiences of my life. I sat in my chair, taking in the film, and was breathless. It never took a wrong step.

As a film-maker myself, I kept a critical watch, waiting for Olmi or one of his actors to misstep. However,I can happily say that 'Il Posto' is a flawless picture. It is deeply moving, visually beautiful, and has a resonating power unlike almost any other film.

I sincerely wish that more people could see and appreciate this picture, and that it was more widely available, because I consider it one of the greatest accomplishments in cinema history. Olmi's beautiful, universal film is worthy of standing alongside the best of Bergman, Kubrick, or Bunuel. Please seek it out!

This is a marvel of film-making, Director Ermanno Olmi, following in the Neo-realist mode of his predecessor Roberto Rossellini, made this as only his second feature film (his first, TIME STOOD STILL, of 1959, is little known, though apparently excellent; it appears to be unavailable with English subtitles). This film has no frills. It is a brilliantly evocative 'fly on the wall' observation of what it was like at that time in Milan to try to find and retain employment. The sadness, the disappointments, the heartache, the bullying, the exploitation are all observed without comment. The two central performances are by Sandro Panseri as the boy Domenico and Loredana Detto as the girl Anotnietta, both seeking their first jobs, and both ending up at the same huge company where they work in separate buildings and essentially never see each other again, despite having bonded and formed the beginnings of a romance. Panseri's innocent and naked performance is positively inspired, but after appearing in two further films over the subsequent four years, he retired from acting, and today apparently manages a supermarket in Milan. Loredana Detto never acted again, but she married Olmi in 1963, and they have three children. The script for this film was jointly written by Olmi and someone named Ettore Lombardo, who never wrote anything for the cinema again. (One might make a mystery film about what happened to the people involved with Olmi in this film, and call it THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING TALENT.) The delicacy of Olmi's handling of this film is miraculous. He realizes the Neo-realist ideal to its full. He gets as 'close to life' as one can reasonably get without being personally involved, and he observes what is happening as if he were an invisible angel monitoring human activity with a helpless sense of melancholy (remember Wim Wenders's WINGS OF DESIRE, 1987, which may have been partially inspired by this earlier style of film-making by the Italians, as Wenders is such a knowledgeable film historian). This film is infinitely sad, but then so is Life.

This is a quiet film, but it leaves a lasting impression. For the good of his family, a young man (Sandro Panseri) has had to abandon his dream of continuing his education to become a surveyor, and hopes to get a job at a big company that's hiring in Milan. From the moment he steps into a crowded room of other applicants, we feel for him. We can already probably appreciate the anxiety associated with the life transition he's going through, but here it's amplified by the dehumanization of the process and the drones who run it. This continues on when he gets a job there, after which he's put at the same desk with an older worker, and finds that his actual duties are somewhat nebulous. It's so absurd as to be comical, especially as he encounters various forms of petty behavior and bureaucracy in the office.

Lightening the mood a bit is a love interest; he sees a young woman also interviewing (Loredana Detto), and has lunch with her. Even here we sense his awkwardness as he tries to make conversation, and then later struggles to re-connect with her. Panseri registers his feelings very well, often without speaking a word, and it helps that he has such a baby face. The scene where he attends a New Year's Eve party, showing up when only an older couple is present, sits through the somewhat cheesy entertainment, and is cajoled to dance by some kindly older women feels incredibly realistic, and of course this is what director Ermanno Olmi was going for.

Another memorable scene occurs after a worker dies, freeing up a desk for him, but everyone then vies for a better desk, and shifts positions. This may be a little exaggerated, but it is how it feels sometimes in a corporate setting, and the film made me think of Bob Dylan's words "twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." There's a deadening of the soul that's taking place here, and while we suspect that the young man will be ok as his life plays out, there is a tinge of sadness in it.

This is a film about ordinary people and it is told in an extraordinary fashion; a young man is not terribly excited to be entering the corporate world--and with good reason. But family and custom and lack of formal education can be persuasive, and so he tests for a position and finds himself in a well-ordered black and white world where individuals count for very little; sounds grim, but director Olmi has a keen eye for the richness of humanity, for the sensitivity of existence, for the quiet celebration of being human. This is a remarkable document, all the more so for being without breathless pacing or minute-by-minute explosions or rounds of gunfire; this is a quiet masterpiece about the richness that can be found by merely observing and the loneliness that is a quintessential part of being human.

This is a shimmeringly beautiful, subtle and very powerful movie about all-too-ordinary people aspiring for "a job for life", and falling into an existence which will kill off any inkling of vitality, individuality and creativity in them, day in, day out. Olmi isn't a filmmaker I often see discussed on this website's boards, not even in a context about Italian filmmakers. Along with Mauro Bolognini, another wonderful but seldom-mentioned fellow countryman of Olmi's, he is occasionally mentioned for The Tree of Wooden Clogs, but not much else. I'll confess I'm not overly familiar with Olmi's oeuvre myself - however, since watching his 1961 gem Il Posto about a month ago, I have barely been able to contain myself and have tirelessly recommended it right, left and centre.

The dehumanising effect of the large corporation, with its ant-like clerks and bureaucrats becoming tiny clog in a faceless machine, is a universal and timeless theme, starting probably with Fritz Lang's Metropolis all the way down to Naomi Klein's No Logo. I never cared for Terry Gillam's Brazil, nor did I consider Sam Lowry an adequate embodiment of the "insignificant" clerk. There was something over-styled about him, something which made him ultimately hip and cool, and something gratingly farcical and rhetorical about Brazil and all its characters generally. On the other hand, Il Posto and its protagonist, the ultimate sympathetic wet rag of a clerk, is achingly real, yet at the same time a sublimely beautiful artistic creation that could probably not have been summarised as successfully by a less accomplished filmmaker. The measured, yet powerful visual satire in Il Posto is probably what I'd wished to see in Gillam's movie, and didn't.

The New Year's Eve office party scene is pure genius and should be studied in film school as a cinematic sequence close to technical, thematical, aesthetic and atmospheric perfection. It conveys so much at once: humour, pathos, social satire and extreme loneliness, besides being beautiful to behold and incredibly original cinematography-wise. It is at once highly artistic and entertaining, accessible. Quiet desperation: there's no better way to describe these characters' condition. Though Olmi doesn't spare us their selfishness and pettiness, he never fails to depict them with humanity and respect, thus showing his eye is a disillusioned, but not misanthropic or cynical one.

One of the final scenes in the movie, in which a gaggle of clerks fight for the privilege of sitting at a recently defunct colleague's front desk, is one of the most depressing sights I've set eyes on. And yet, you can't help but feel deeply sorry for these hyenas in cheap suits and neon-pale faces, rather than feel angry or scornful against them. You just want to scream to Domenico to "Get out while you can!!!" The poor, gormless, meek, dork-boy, bumbling through his first taste of a mediocre adulthood, a boy you fear might probably never grow enough of an awareness or backbone to react against such a dehumanising system. Antonietta, also know as Magali, the pretty girl he meets during the company's selection process of the applicants and fast develops an attraction for, seems to have more individuality, more resources to survive the dehumanisation process. But then, you think for a moment about the fact that from a very early age, Domenico had been designated as the one who'd drop out of school early so that he could go out and contribute to the family's meagre income. Meanwhile, his younger brother had been chosen between the two to continue studying, perhaps even get a high school diploma or degree, thus fulfilling himself and improving his lot. One would assume that from childhood, the milder Domenico had been treated as the "dim" one, the one who'd rightfully sacrifice himself to allow his more promising brother to emerge out of their family's working-class, suburban obscurity. The scary part is that this isn't simply a dramatic plot device to increase the pathos - it's so plausible and depressingly true to life for its time and context!

I was also deeply moved and touched by the fleeting appearance of the character of the older, married man who miserably fails the first written test (the one that the corporation's applicants take in an empty, grand old palace, so at odds with the suburban squallor and Northern Italian, typical 1960s industrial modernity). He embodies, epitomises and belongs to pre-economic miracle Italy, back when illiteracy and a rural existence was the norm. Probably either almost illiterate, or unable to apply even the most basic principles of arithmetic, he's a throwback to another era, which had ended roughly around the 1950s. He desperately tries to fit into the city, the burgeoning industrial North, the new Italy, but miserably fails before even getting anywhere. How will he and all those like him survive in this dehumanising shift into a brand new, industrial era? It's heart-breaking. Though Il Posto is also so much about Italy and its staggeringly fast move throughout the 50s and 60s from backward rural country to world industrial power, it remains first and foremost a universal, timeless movie. Very highly recommended.