Word: olmi
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...FIANCES. From the simple tale of a long-engaged couple enduring a painful separation, Italian Director Ermanno Olmi has created a minor cinema classic...
...FIANCES. Italy's Ermanno Olmi (The Sound of Trumpets) brings total mastery of his art to this wispy tale of a long-engaged couple who must lose each other to rediscover their love...
Domenico observes his new world with passive half-comprehension. Olmi does not tell us that he might have been more; he has been lucky--we are constantly reminded--lucky to have passed his exams, lucky to have been hired, lucky to have been taken into the corporate "family." The job, with its occasional minor advances, shall be his all. We are permitted brief glances into the emptiness of the outside lives of his co-workers. Caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, they exist without misery, without real joy, on a treadmill of uncompromising mediocrity. Yet this restrained portrait of an Italian...
...beauty of Olmi's firm lies in his suggestion that even this gray existence contains moments which justify the trumpets of his title--moments that make them more than the toy horn Domenico awkardly tweetles at the party, more than the imaginary bugles his mother must blow to wake him for work. In part they celebrate the quiet heroism required to endure the drabness of day to day experience. More important, they herald those unexpected appearances which break the stultifying regularity in which Domenico finds himself trapped; the possibility of love and the hope that love promises...
...Olmi has directed his first feature film with a poetic, slowly-paced delicacy that reminds one of Truffaut; he handles the fumbling love between Domenico and Antonietta with a subdued richness of feeling that characterized the most subtle moments of Chayefsky's Marty. He focuses his camera on countless specks of life which we, as well as his own characters, have hurried past. And a potent, bottled-up vitality swells from under even the most mundane street scene or conversation. Declining the easy gimmicks of wierd camera angles or background music, yet nevertheless infusing his simple story with extraordinary emotional...