Les Fiancés

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.

In many ways, Italian film "I Fidanzati"/The Fiances can be considered as a stylish extension of Ermanno Olmi's previous film "Il Posto". Both of his films present the preponderance of man over machine as human beings have the ability to reveal their sentiments, crack a joke, dance and sing. Olmi has shot his film with the astute eyes of a documentary filmmaker who is more interested in capturing the daily lives of his protagonists. A scene which elicits widespread sympathy involves the waiter of an industrial hostel who shares the troubled tale of his son's illness with a new employee. The industrial landscape of Sicily has been shown in all its honesty with some casual yet frank shots of industrial plants with workers who toil throughout days and nights. A sensible viewer does not lose much time to discover that this is a film about a man trying to find his rightful place amidst a fast changing industrial scenario where some old men are believed to have collapsed due to loneliness. The film also echoes its Neorealist concerns about the romantic lives of two young people who had to separate due to circumstances beyond their control. Ermanno Olmi creates a balanced position of young lovers by showing how each of them is dealing with the absence of the other partner. Finally,I Fidanzati is a perfect film for those viewers who would like true to life stories unroll before their eyes.

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 is elegant sixties modernism with a subtle socialist thrust. With a bit too much technique, concentration on beautiful, striking shots and fragmented narration studded with flashbacks, the story and characters, though interesting, don't have quite enough weight to involve the viewer. The modernist love of the cryptic goes a little overboard, though in an intriguing way, as for example in the long opening sequence in a dance hall as people gather for the dance and you take a while to figure out what's going on. The man takes a career opportunity to move up from welding by going to work at a distant, isolated plant. The plant and its environs represent industrial capitalism and the city overspreading the countryside. Arresting moments, like the dog straying into the church, or the young boy working very fast in the restaurant, as well as the individuality of a variety of people glimpsed in passing, give the movie a mysterious and moving charm. Yet telling so much of the story without dialog weakens our sense of the characters. It draws you in slowly but a bit too much is withheld. Il Posto stays closer to the characters and feels warmer, though the ending of Fidanzati has magic.

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.