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North and south, a long engagement. Like L'Eclisse it opens in the wake of a couple's fight, though not before a marvelous overture in a little Milanese ballroom: People waiting in the dark, powder strewn across the floor, the organist's warm-up notes, awkward invitations leading to awkward spins (a pair of older women take the first step). The lady (Anna Canzi) is in no mood for dancing, her fiancé (Carlo Cabrini) has a new job in Sicily, "you know how it is with transfers." The first night away brings refinery fires in the distance, a sterile hostel room and supper from an exhausted waiter, then plenty of wandering with fellow transplanted workers. Il boom, as De Sica would say, is a modernist wave with a dehumanizing side, full of cold beauty. (Mounds of salt on a flat landscape and the fuochi d'artificio of welding sparks are beguiling only when seen from a distance, away from the arduous labor.) Mutts wander into churches and loudspeakers announce lost wallets in this new town, sparse distraction comes from pranksters or the confetti and masks of a local party. "Poor thing, so far from home..." Despite the encroaching "mentalità industriale," Ermanno Olmi keeps faith in his protagonists' emotional mobility: The separation the lovers feared would dissolve their feelings for each other instead pulls them closer in a rush of rediscovery. As letters are exchanged and read and memories and impressions blurr in an accelerating montage, the cozy observer of Il Posto suddenly reveals Resnaisesque bravura and Borzagean romanticism. (Despair melts away before a remembrance of a smile during a motorcycle ride.) Schlesinger's contemporaneous A Kind of Living heads in another direction, here Olmi and his characters prepare to brave the storm. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |