Word: olmi
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...single film could justify the entire film festival, then this year that film is certainly Ermanno Olmi's One Fine Day. It harks back in some ways to the tradition of postwar Italian realism and its masters, among them Rossellini and De Sica. Yet Olmi's films seem more precise, more tightly constructed, more acute. He has a film maker's sense of composition and a novelist's sense of rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita...
...relentless virtuosity-none of Wajda's beautiful but monotonously static compositions, none of the bludgeoning Polanski's Wellesian low angels and shock cuts, none of the coy mysteriousness common to Shop on Main Street and Joseph Kilian. Forman is more Western in temperament, a humanist in the Renoir-Truffaut-Olmi line of descent...
...perhaps there is just something unintegrable about this pointed satire (however compassionate it may be) and the personal episodes following. I think we can guess pretty safely that the earlier episodes, in the dance-hall, are not quite Forman's natural idioms, but more that of his exemplar Ermanno Olmi (Forman eulogized Olmi's Sound of Trumpets in a Sight and Soundinterview last winter). Rereading that interview, I find Forman saying...
...hard to imagine how Olmi could have simplified his exposition. There cannot be more than a hundred lines in the film's hour and a quarter. A few shots of Carlo Cabrini's and Ann Canzi's faces define their relations. Short flash-backs played off against Giovanni's activities in Sicily tell the rest...
...background of Giovanni's Sicilian wanderings are the gigantic industrial complex in which he works and the windmills and huts of the peasants. Olmi makes a point of the contrast, but he makes it gently. The two contests through which Giovanni wanders, yet in which he has no roots accentuate his loneliness, and contribute to the pervasive sadness which is part of the sense of life that Olmi communicates...