Word: olmi
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...modern times, the story of initiation has taken a gloomy turn--it has been painted as an end to innocence, an exposure to squalor or violence, a rude "realistic" shock from which the youth may never recover. Economic, moral, and interpersonal burdens conspire to shatter his early sensitivity. Ermanno Olmi has written and directed a film of a contemporary initiation which spurns both these alternatives...
...Dedalus embarking upon a tragic bildungsroman; neither is he a dashing hero in a setting devoid of heroism. Domenico's passage into adulthood takes place without ceremony or bravado. He passes quietly, but not painlessly, self-consciously, but never cutely, into a world of hopeless vacuity. Throughout the movie Olmi shows him what he may become--a dulled commuter from lower middle-class suburbs, a paunchy clerk gazing through shop windows, an embittered office-worker yearning for a piddling promotion...
They are both wrong. In the second of his films to be shown in the U.S., Italy's Ermanno Olmi (The Sound of Trumpets) tells a gentle and touching story of how distance lends enchantment to a love that had lost its charm. More to the point, he tells the story with inordinate art; film buffs everywhere acknowledge The Fiancés as a classic of the new cinema...
...Olmi's hero (Carlo Cabrini) is a welder, an ordinary workingman: doomed to his job, tied to his home town. Sicily seems to him an inhospitable place. The company hotel looks like a concrete waffle. The nearest town is huts and ruts. The local night life is limited to a single soda fountain of soul-searing fluorescence. After three weeks in this hell, the miserable welder imagines home as heaven and his fiancée (Anna Canzi) as an angel. When she sends him a letter, he greets it like an annunciation. Eagerly he replies, and soon the fianc...
...dull. Slow in this film is fascinating, as a big slow snake is fascinating. Slow is the director's way of giving the spectator time to experience the story as life is experienced: moment by moment and yet somehow also as a simultaneous entirety. At 32, Olmi is a master of his complex craft, but he wisely uses his art to conceal his art and to reveal what he means...