Cinema Talk

I wouldn’t wish a long-distance relationship on my worst enemy. Mind you, I don’t really have a worst enemy, but my point stands. The phenomenon arrives from a compromise: the person you love is going somewhere else physically but neither of you can bear the idea of concluding the romance from such a massive inconvenience. I’m sure there are people who this has worked out for, but I cannot count myself as a participant in a successful long-distance relationship. From my personal experience, it produced a unique and unfamiliar type of anguish and longing, the sort that isn’t commonly depicted in art. It’s something that requires a delicate precision to depict, and it is something that Ermanno Olmi accomplishes in I fidanzati.

Lovers Liliana and Giovanni enter a small dancehall. The action has already begun, but the two pick out a table on the outskirts of the dance floor and they sit together in moody silence. Giovanni initiates a dance, but Liliana declines. This brutal date, we soon learn, is the couple’s last before Giovanni leaves Milan for Sicily. Adding to the bittersweetness, the locale was chosen as it was where the lovers first met each other. Giovanni’s job has relocated him with the promise of advancing his career. The move is temporary, 18 months we’re told, and is tantamount to a promotion but both parties in the relationship seem very unsure of themselves.  

I first saw I fidanzati 14 years ago. I was still a teenager. I had already been transfixed by Olmi’s previous film, Il Posto. To me, Il Posto was especially remarkable for how it true to life it felt. I understood the realism Olmi accomplished had lineage in the works of Rosselini and De Sica, but it felt like something completely different to me. He was not advancing a rhetoric of social condemnation but simply observing. The anxiety of that film’s young protagonist, Domenico, felt real to me because it resembled the way I faced a world that was beginning to feel more and more intimidating and exciting. As it was, I was impressed by I fidanzati but it was Il Posto that moved me.

The beautiful thing about cinema is that it is an art form and as such, one’s response to it can fluctuate. Our existence is always in flux, and our thoughts evolve. In this instance, it is more importantly that life events factor in. A budding teenage cinephile in suburban Ohio (uhh, that’s me, or was, rather) can maybe feel some of the longing expressed in I fidazanti but he certainly didn’t understand or connect with it on a deeper level. A 31-year-old man in Brooklyn (that’s also me) meanwhile has been shaped by the world through life experiences that have evolved and hurt him. The longing Olmi communicates here in even more impressive because it replicates an aching I endured.

Time works differently in I fidanzati than it does in Il Posto. The earlier film, for all of its strengths (and there are many) is far more linear. It works considering the subject matter, as someone as young as Domenico probably experiences life in a linear fashion. That is, when you’re younger, you are anticipating the future and are thus less dogged by your past, haunted by failures, frustrated over would-be relations. In I fidanzati, we have Giovanni, who is older and has done more. While he is often in the present – which is depicted through his acclimation to a new environment (not unlike Domenico’s acclimation to office life in Il Posto) he is just as often in the past, reminiscing of tender moments he shared with Liliana. The result is a full dimensional portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a new reality.

Olmi’s compositions are magnificent, of course, which helps to establish the anguish of his lovers. There seems to be a wonder in several of the set-pieces in Sicily, in particular. It’s almost as though he’s a documentarian linking a series of short pieces into one cohesive story, rather than structuring a film around a concise narrative. In one such scenes, Giovanni wanders into a church. He sits in the back, away from service and the clutch of children attending. He, like Olmi’s camera, is an observer rather than an active participant. Then, suddenly, a dog wonders in and causes chaos. The humor in Olmi’s world feels almost accidental, further fueling the quiet style of observation with which he shapes his films.

It’s in the final fifteen minutes that Olmi really ramps the film’s elliptical nature into hyperdrive. We jump back into the initial courting of Liliana and Giovanni. Knowing what we know from the previous hour, there is something unmistakably poignant in these little moments we now share with the couple. The two of them frolicking in a swimming hole, stroking each other face’s wordlessly in the grass, and even arguing. These are the moments that populate a relationship, and they must be replaced with something else when the two live in different cities. In this reverie, even the ugly moments become something to pine for as at least then you could talk to the person face to face. “We each kept our thoughts to ourselves” says Liliana as the film cuts back to the couple wordlessly facing each other, a composition from the film’s opening sequence. Time away brings thoughts, thoughts bring things you want to say but sometimes the distance is too great an impediment.