Il posto + I fidanzati
Italian neo-realism and humanitarian sentiment meet in writer-director Ermanno Olmi, whose docudrama style wins over all that see it. In Il posto (The Job) a meek Milano goes through the humiliating process of applying for a career as a civil servant; in I fidanzati (The Betrothed) we witness the long-distance suffering of a young engineer relocated to Sicily for months, while his fianceé worries back home. The prolific, energetic Olmi has a knack for recording a living reality, reflected in Radiance’s excellent extras for this double-bill release.
Il posto + I fidanzati
Blu-ray
Radiance Films
1961 / 1963 / B&W / 1:37 Academy + 1:85 widescreen
Street Date January 27, 2025
Available from Radiance / £21.66
Written and Directed by Ermanno Olmi
There are still foreign films that make big news in festivals but not that many that take the U.S. art theaters (the ones that still exist) by storm. Back in the day, art houses could count on anything by Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, etc., making a splash, while equally good shows by Chabrol, Visconti, Kurosawa, etc. might strike it big only if given a big push by a U.S. distributor.
In the midst of Godard movies and pictures with Sophia Loren or Brigitte Bardot came a great many shows that won prizes in Europe but only scored critical applause here. After years of documenataries and scripted slice-of-life dramas about working people, Ermanno Olmi won the Cannes Palm d’or with The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a painstaking recreation of peasant life in the Italian countryside in the 1800s. But Olmi’s reputation was made with his first scripted drama Il posto, a pleasingly plainwrap story of a young man applying for a job in the civil service.
Radiance follows up on a pair of Criterion discs released 22 years ago. Told in a charmingly non-sentimental filming style, Olmi’s two early scripted dramas Il posto and I fidanzati evoke working reality in an Italy less than twenty years recovered from the World War.
Il posto
1961 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 93 + 96 minutes / The Job, The Sound of Trumpets
Starring: Loredana Detto, Sandro Panseri, Tullio Kezich, Mara Revel.
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Production Designer: Ettore Lombardi
Film Editor: Carla Colombo
Original Music: Pier Emilio Bassi
Produced by Alberto Soffientini
Written and Directed by Ermanno Olmi
Il posto is a truly sweet little movie that’s equal parts drama and ethnographic reportage. We follow a shy young man’s progress in his first job, and share the one bright hope in his life when he meets his potential dream girl. Shot in unembellished black & white and relentlessly literal, Olmi’s film sticks so closely to mundane reality, one would think it was Olmi’s personal memoir.
Quiet and unprepossessing, Domenico Cantoni (Sandro Panseri) goes through the labyrinthine hiring process at an unspecified large company. He’s so shy and transparently confused, it’s a wonder he can find his way to the right building. Domenico’s parents are nervous, as being hired in this company might represent a lifetime of secure employment. Domenico endures all of the tests and questions as if under arrest. It all seems hopeless. But then he meets Antonietta Masetti (Loredana Detto), a beauty with a cute smile who appears to find him equally cute. They hit it off so well, they almost forget to return to work on time. Both are hired, but Domenico finds himself assigned to a building far away from Antonietta, serving as a messenger while waiting for a clerk’s position to open up. But when they meet briefly in a hallway, she promises to try to meet him at the company’s upcoming New Year’s party …
Poor Domenico is supposed to be one of the lucky ones, winning a slot, a position, a spot (all better translations of the title) at the kind of company that can keep one employed for life. What we see is mostly depressing. The white collar applicants range from quietly obnoxious to quietly introverted, and the silly tests they’re put through are humiliating exercises designed to ascertained if they can hear and follow simple instructions. Domenico is assigned a temp position by an executive who doesn’t even look at him. He spends his time as a messenger doing mostly nothing.
We get a good look at the pool of clerks where Domenico may be spending the rest of his working life. It’s just eight or nine desks crammed into a tiny space. Each employee has picked up habitual behaviors, and some are working little scams. One enterprising crook has a petty racket filching and selling light bulbs. One older lady (Mara Revel) always seems on the verge of tears. A fussy man wastes time carefully cutting up cigarettes, etc. It looks like the most depressing place on earth, almost as demoralizing as the fluorescent hell that will later daunt another lowly wage slave, Joe Banks. And Domenico is supposed to be grateful to have landed there.
About as sweet as guy can get, Domenico carefully thinks over the simplest questions before answering, even though he’s quite intelligent. He carries a sad sack ‘lost puppy’ look wherever he goes. It repeatedly evokes sympathetic reactions from every woman he meets, including the secretary of the big boss. But being anywhere near Antonietta brings Domenico to life — it’s obvious that he thinks about her day and night. Their scenes together are about as fresh as ‘young-love’ moments can get, even though all we see them do is hold hands, and barely that. As his job and his nervousness conspire to keep them apart, we watch Domenico putting all his hopes toward seeing her at the big company dance. That opportunity turns out to be an elaborate sequence of pitiful awkwardness.
This is a definite ‘slice of life’ story that’s as concerned with Milan at a certain point in history as it is with the leading drama. We want Domenico to get to spend more time with his dream girl, but the film is consistently authentic when dealing with the mundane problems of ordinary people. Domenico is more likely to share an umbrella with a sympathetic older lady than connect with Antonietta in the rain. At the big party, he’s invited to the table of another couple — who really want the bottle of champagne he’s carrying.
At one point we break from watching poor lovable Domenico find his way through life for a quick roundup of the home-lives of the other clerks. Are they a glimse of the future Domenico will have if he stays in the pool? The clerks’ pay barely covers the rent. Some are lonely. The light bulb thief is writing a secret novel at a tiny home desk. The sad older lady, always crying, suffers a James Joyce moment when she finds her own sons have stolen money right from her wallet. We hope that Domenico finds a way out of this so-called favored position. But we sure have an appreciation for how people of a certain class lived in 1960s Italy.
Were stories about ‘young folks starting out’ an Italian subgenre? The first chapter in the (full length) omnibus film Boccaccio ’70 is aboout Renzo e Luciana, a penniless young couple who must keep their marriage a secret because it violates company rules. Trouble is unavoidable when a supervisor puts pressure on Luciana for a date, right under Renzo’s nose. Predating Il posto by 5 years is Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist effort Il tetto (The Roof), about young marrieds desperate for a home of their own. They discover that regulations allow them to sort-of homestead on the outskirts of town, if they find a disused site and construct a hovel with a roof in one day.
In the disc extras (detailed below) we discover that Ermanno Olmi began on the same kind of career path that Domenico finds so intimidating, working for a large Italian power company, Edison. At least one of his dozens of short films was commissioned by that corporation. We also learn that Olmi married Loredana Detto, the actress who played his beautiful young heroine Antonietta.
I fidanzati
1963 / 77 minutes / 1:85 widescreen / The Fiances
Starring: Carlo Cabrini, Anna Canzi.
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Art Director: Ettore Lombardi
Film Editor: Carla Colombo
Original Music: Gianni Ferrio
Produced by Goffredo Lombardo
Written and Directed by Ermanno Olmi
A look at Ermanno Olmi’s IMDB credits reveal at least 40 short films before his feature film breakout, and he contined filming short pictures throughout his career, in between features and TV movies. Il posto is always listed as his first film, but he also made the thriller Time Stood Still in 1959 (and in Totalscope!).
Olmi made two more short films before his second award-winning feature film I fidanzati, which became a nominee for the Cannes Palm d’Or. An extended meditation on the realities of working-class living, I fidanzati angles away from melodrama, skewing in favor of an almost ascetic documentary approach. The film is as much a record of a changing Italy as it is a study of separated lovers; it’s as time-fractured by memory as a more showy art film, yet communicates its points very clearly. Ermanno Olmi’s direct style looks like the kind of realist film that mainstream ’70s filmmakers were aiming for. Once again, Olmi makes inspired choices for his main players.
Long engaged, Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi) go to the dance hall where they first met, but have a miserable evening: he has decided to take a 16-month trip to Sicily. It’s a necessary career move, an employment opportunity he can’t reject. Anna is convinced that the long distance will cause their engagement to fall apart, and they don’t part happily. In Sicily, Giovanni is lonely. He finds a ramshackle room in town and takes long walks, noticing how the rural land is being changed by industrialization. Eventually, he and Liliana exchange letters again, raising hopes that their separation might turn out to be a mutual benefit.
A simple story told without undue elaboration, I Fidanzati again shows director Ermanno Olmi’s undervalued strengths. The acting of his two non-professional leads is amazing. He gets from them performances that would be the envy of older neorealists like Rossellini. Sometimes they simply communicate moods through facial expressions. If Olmi is ‘the next stage’ in the evolution of the neorealist movement, it is because he rejects big, dramatic events to give his pictures a conventional shape. He instead chooses to focus on the mundane problems of ordinary working people. Of course, it is Olmi’s judgment that makes it work. We really believe in Giovanni and Liliana. Their ‘ordinary’ problems would be understood by any audience anywhere.
In this case, the problem is a job that breaks up a young couple, the kind who have already waited years for the opportunity to marry. Decent, hopeful, but too old to react like kids, Giovanni and Liliana become morose when he decides he has to leave. It’s clearly the right choice. He’s a skilled welder, and the job brings advancement that might fund a proper marriage. But Liliana knows what can happen to lovers split apart, and sinks into depression.
We follow Giovanni to a sunny, rather backward Sicily, where the company men patronize the locals. The locals persist in attitudes inconsistent with the new industrial scheme of things: when it rains, the workers stay home. Giovanni’s experiences are too uneventful to be adventures, and too interesting to be dull. Liliana of course worries about her man being stolen by some Sicilian woman. But Giovanni’s only romantic opportunity comes from his landlady, and his response is to quickly retreat to his room.
In any event, Sicilian custom keeps most local young women far out of the reach of the workers from the mainland. At a big costume party, he dances with a veiled girl who can tell he’s lonely, but she kisses him only under cover of anonymity. We know it’s okay. Giovanni convinces us that he’s not a guy looking to stray.
In a story about separation, the natural reaction would be to give each partner a series of temptations to give in to, or overcome. I Fidanzati has no patience for this; in the months Carlo and Liliana are apart, neither goes looking for other companionship. Thus they get a chance to weigh the meaning of their relationship. Late in the game he and Liliana revive their romance through letters, finding in their separation that the bond between them is real. It gives the otherwise eventless conclusion a warm ray of hope.
Anna Canzi has one of those fascinating faces, mature but transparently emotional. We’re able to read a complexity of response into her expressions. Olmi knows that confected dialogue and other literary/theatrical conventions can’t get at the real truth of people, any more than they are useful to understand the people we live with, or even ourselves. His quiet observations of his actors have a power no playwright could equal.
Carlo Cabrini plays a working man with a rough exterior and crew cut that contrasts with his polite and sensitive nature. He looks like a cross between Jack Palance and John Philip Law, but without the attendant narcissism. A closed-off kind of guy, everything we learn about him comes from his body language. he’s a perfect hero to follow. Olmi makes us feel comfortable with his actors as if they were people we knew.
These two movies are often paired. When we first saw Il posto we assumed incorrectly that I fidanzati was going to be a sequel with further ‘adventures’ of Domenico and Antonietta. The story of Giovanni and Liliana is just as interesting — a more experienced couple at another time of change. Olmi was clearly interested in telling stories of Italian working realities at a certain point in time — potentially good jobs are finally available to working class people, entry-level positions and labor jobs that might lead to a better life. We wonder if Olmi ever thought of continuing … the next story might find a couple just getting started with babies of their own.
Radiance Films’ Blu-ray of Il posto + I fidanzati is a beautiful restoration of these handsome B&W pictures that share a lot of production personnel. The transfers are impeccable, and Lamberto Caimi’s cinemtography rich, even in dull offices in the company. Because of the subject matter we expect a documentary look for Il posto … but Olmi has smooth trucking shots on sidewalks, etc..
I fidanzati does have more of a documentary look, even though its aspect ratio is widescreen. The time frame is more relaxed, and there are more scenes of Giovanni and others in isolation against glamour-challenged backgrounds. But the feeling in both pictures is the same — the little dramas feel intimate, lived.
The restoration is said to have been done in 4K from the original camera negatives. The presentation is on two separate discs; the films were reviewed on check discs, so we aren’t certain of the packaging. We think that the two separate covers are on one side of the insert slip, front and back, and that the other side has this composite cover. We also had no access to an insert booklet said to have an essay by critic Christina Newland.
Radiance’s video extras spread contributor testimony over two discs. Maurzio Zaccaro identifies Umberto Olmi as his mentor in a warm 20-minute talk. Cinematographer Lamberto Calmi and author Richard Dyer appear in separate video items on each disc. Contrasting with Dyer is the film programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht, who describes Olmi’s career and influence from another viewpoint.
Il posto comes with a second encoding about 4 minutes longer, with a scene that wasn’t in the original release; it’s also viewable as a separate item. The lovesick Domenico mopes around a soggy funfair and wins a goldfish; he then visits a fellow clerk’s house where everyone makes a fuss over a new baby.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Il posto + I fidanzati
Blu-ray rates:
Movies: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Appreciation by filmmaker Maurizio Zaccaro (2024, 19 mins)
Interviews with cinematographer Lamberto Caimi (2024, 17 and 11 mins)
Interviews with author Richard Dyer (2024, 39, 23 mins)
Interview with programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht on Ermanno Olmi (2024, 16 mins)
Limited edition illustrated booklet with new writing by critic Christina Newland.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two Blu-rays in Keep case
Reviewed: February 1, 2025
(7274olmi)
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I saw Il Posto for the first (and as of now, only) time back in 1975, when I was about the same age as poor Domenico, it was quite an eye opener. Still remember the scene at the end with the copying machine. Saw it in a class called “Film as Literature” at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. What a contrast – seeing this B&W movie about working class Italians within the sunny, beachy vibe of OCC. This was years before videotapes, of course, our instructor threaded the movie through a film projector. Still grateful to the instructor for giving me my first look at movies like “Il Posto” and I. Bergman, Rohmer, Antonioni, etc.