I fidanzati (1963)

31 01 2023

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.


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Categories : Reviews

La circostanza / The Circumstance (1973)

11 05 2020

It’s been many years since I first fell in love with Ermanno Olmi through his two early features, Il Posto and I fidanzati. Despite this, the rest of his work has escaped me. A copy of his debut Time Stood Still lingered on a hard drive that eventually crashed and when he got his big New York City retrospective at Lincoln Center last year, I couldn’t find the time. This seems indicative of his standing in the history of world cinema. He has many passionate disciples, but the arc of his career seems to fall through the cracks. He came into his own in the 1960s, and yet no description of his career is missing a reference to neorealism. I can see the connection in a film like Il Posto, but by 1973, the much-studied film movement had come and gone. It is wise to strip the filmmaker from the association, then. The Circumstance is tender, opaque, and disorienting. It’s about as far away from neorealism as possible.

Laura is a successful lawyer and the head of the family. She is precise and controlling, while her husband, not quite a pushover, is decidedly passive. She has three children, Beppe, Silvia, and Tommaso. Beppe has rejected the life of luxury that the family’s wealth has afforded the rest of them. He lives on the family farm with his pregnant wife, Anna. Silvia, on the other hand, seems to be mesmerized and frustrated by the trance of young love. Tommaso frustrates Laura because he prioritizes a bizarre interest in robots over his studies. Laura’s razor’s edge approach to life is interrupted when she witnesses a motorcycle accident and she grows increasingly attached to the handsome victim.

Olmi had already shown his intense elliptical slant in I fidanzati. In that film, the scale is smaller, and the focus is more precise. There, we have two lovers and we immediately understand the limited narrative detail: they are engaged but spatially separated. Because of this, Olmi’s artistry is less muddled. The narrative simplicity pairs perfectly with the aesthetic. Our attention doesn’t need to be given to “events” but instead to the fleeting, bittersweet tone that Olmi expertly crafts in an experience that feels like an extended montage. He’s just as elliptical in The Circumstance, but the issue here is that he’s juggling too many balls. Even though it is similarly plotless, there’s probably too much going on here.

For some, this will render the film slight as it often plays like a character study without any elucidation of the characters. To me, though, Olmi does stumble on the same bittersweet sensation of his earlier films. This is clearest in the sequences involving Silvia and her frustrating “summer of love” which is rendered with compassion, but also depleted of its youthful excitement. She seems apathetic to her would-be lover, and Olmi’s approach is similarly distanced. He brilliantly splices up the order of their romance, revisiting key moments with disorienting repetition. Silvia’s story bears a strong resemblance to an early Eric Rohmer film thrown into a blender with Antonioni’s similarly muted portraits of youth in Blow-up and Zabriskie Point. It’s easily the best part of the movie.

The other characters don’t fair quite as well. Family matriarch Laura’s key fascination with the handsome victim of the motorcycle accident has a fun conflict. Here, she sees purpose in her life. Perhaps the opportunity to scratch the maternal itch that she never had access to with her own children. But also, there’s an undeniable sexual tension in her devotion. With what we’re given, Olmi wisely decides to only hint at either of these routes. Eventually, the victim checks out of the hospital and Laura likely never sees him again. I have no issue with the ambivalence greeting both Laura and Silvia’s stories. In fact, I encourage it, but they’re flanked by the far less compelling exploits of the family’s male members. Tomasso’s presence, in particular, seems so weightless, he could just as easily float away.

The Circumstance is a showcase of Olmi’s mastery, but it lacks the focus of the earlier films. There’s something so specific and perfect about Domenico in Il Posto. That film offers just as few answers as The Circumstance, but its vagueness pivots to personal anxieties. There’s something unmistakably poignant in Domenico facing a future of benign office work. In I fidanzati, the scope expands ever so cautiously to two people. Lost in this film is a pointed critique of a bourgeoise family. As it is, we get a family facing that which can barely qualify as “turmoil.” Silvia’s elliptical romance could be the foundation for a wonderful film, but it only amounts to a small fraction of the film. The other family members are given priority. The slow march of time sweeps away their problems, and their status holds firm. The interruption in their lives is curious, but it is not particularly moving.


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