I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Anna Canzi and Carlo Cabrini in I Fidanzati

Liliana: Anna Canzi
Giovanni: Carlo Cabrini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Art direction: Ettore Lombardi
Film editing: Carla Colombo
Music: Gianni Ferrio

Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati begins with an empty room, a kind of stage if you will, on which the first act of his small romantic drama will be played out. It's a large room, apparently some kind of meeting hall, in which the chairs and tables have been pushed to the sides. People begin to enter, including two men who scatter wax on what will become a dance floor. A pianist and an accordionist take their places on a small stage in a corner, and the tables and chairs along the walls begin to be occupied by people, some couples, some single. They are ordinary looking people, plain and paunchy and many of them middle-aged, but Olmi manages to direct our attention to a younger couple who are somewhat better-looking than most of the others in the room: She's pretty in a fresh, unmade-up way; he's craggily handsome. They are Liliana and Giovanni, the engaged couple of the film's title, but they're also oddly tense with each other, as if they've just had a quarrel. When the musicians strike up a banal foxtrot, people slowly, self-consciously take the floor, starting with a pair of elderly women. Liliana and Giovanni watch the dancers silently until he stands up and invites her to dance with him. She indicates her lack of interest, so he crosses the room and finds another woman to dance with. Liliana and Giovanni have been engaged for a long time, never having quite saved enough money from their jobs to get married and find a place of their own. They are at odds tonight because he has just been offered a job by his company that includes advancement and better pay, but the job is in Sicily, hundreds of miles to the south, and she can't go with him. I Fidanzati, in short, is about the incompatibility of love and work. It's also set in a crucial moment in Italian history, when the postwar industrial and economic boom has begun to transform people's lives. Olmi's film, then, might be compared to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films set in the era of the German Wirtschaftswunder, when prosperity upended people's lives. Nothing so drastic happens to Giovanni as happens to Fassbinder's Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), of course, but when he takes the job in Sicily Giovanni finds himself in much the same position as Ali: a stranger in a strange land, uprooted from all that's familiar, especially his long-term relationship with his fiancée. Fortunately, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in separation Giovanni and Liliana find their relationship undergoing some kind of renewal. Olmi is not a sentimental sap, however, and he chooses to conclude his film with a thunderstorm that interrupts a telephone call between the fidanzati, which some interpret as a symbol of their ongoing differences. But sometimes a thunderstorm is just a thunderstorm, and what really matters in Olmi's film is the skill with which he establishes the two characters, the deep authenticity of the two hitherto unknown actors who play them, the artful use of flashbacks and narrative disjunctions to create a mood and tone, and a camera that seeks out the beauty amid banality.