Post-World War II Italy. A queue of able-bodied workers form in front of an office building where they struggle to compete for the couple of jobs offered for the day. Some of them have not worked for a year, but the job is given Antonio Ricci because, among his other skills, he has a bicycle. The job is hanging movie posters, and requires that he can speedily get around Rome.
Antonio wants to be the provider for his family. He has a patient and resilient wife, a new baby, and young son Bruno, maybe six, who is hard-working and full of love. Tony and Bruno go off to work together in the morning, both dressed proudly in their uniforms. Bruno works pumping gas at a gas station for twelve hours a day while Antonio begins his first day at work. At first I thought perhaps Bruno was going to school--his mother made him an omelette before he left, and it looked as if there were more children were he was dropped off at--however the squalor of the family necessitates he work.
As the title would suggest a thief steals his bicycle while Tony is up on a ladder hanging his posters. There is a heart-breaking moment in the film when Tony goes to report the robbery to the police. A second officer approaches the first inspector and asks if it is something important who responds, "Nothing. Just a bicycle." For Antonio the bicycle is everything, it is his livelihood, it is the well-being and happiness of his family. For him his bicycle means "we can live again." The rest of the film follows Antonio and Bruno as they scour the streets trying to find his precious treasure. Through their search they meet an old man that has recently come in contact with the thief, a soothsayer who only speaks doomsday, and the thief himself, a young man who shares a one-room apartment with three members of his family. He gains the help of some friends who stop their own work to help him look. The comradery is moving.
As he comes closer to finding his bike he becomes more and more desperate to achieve the goal. The methods that he takes to convince people around him for help become more and more questionable. All the while there is Bruno, so fond of his father and so susceptible. Antonio must create a balancing act as he tries to push the limits of his morals while still providing an acceptable image of himself for his son. This film reminded me in many ways of the more recent and very popular La vita e bella. In that movie too there is a boy, still pure and unaffected by the misery that his life is filled with, who looks up to his father with reverence. His adoring father does what he can to protect that innocence in a time and location where the means that are employed break the bounds of day to day life.
The end of the film is spectacular. Throughout the movie we regard the thief as a monster. How could he do this to our young Antonio and his family! Has he no heart? The strength of this film comes in the end where Antonio unhinges the limits of what he believed he was capable of and becomes the monster that the audience has spent the last hour and a half building rage against. The final images of father and son disappearing faceless into the crowd are haunting.
Bicycle Thieves is an iconic film of the Italian Neorealism genre. Italian directors of the 40' and 50's wished to create movies that depicted poverty and struggle following the Great War in Italy. Most were filmed on location with amateur actors in order to preserve the authenticity of the tone and material. Their films were not meant to shed a light of hope (as this film makes clear), but were rather meant to inspire outrage against an incompetent bureaucratic system that failed to creates jobs for those who fought for their country. This film has emotional power that is not seen often. It is frustrating to know that so much depended on two wheels and a frame for one man trying to keep his family alive after the bombs stopped falling.
4/4
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