In these scenes, the mental and physical strain of the search begins to show, when Antonio runs ahead of Bruno to take cover from a sudden shower of rain and Bruno, as if unrehearsed, slips and falls flat on his face. Naturalistic moments between Bruno and Antonio are also evident during the course of events that begin at the Porta Portese market, where stolen bicycle parts end up on the black market. The gesture echoes something eternal about the relationship between the two, which is again reinforced when Antonio drops Bruno off at a gas station and we see the latter immediately get to work, awkwardly lifting and filling heavy cans with his small and clumsy frame. Wearing coveralls, he gets a smaller version of the egg sandwich that Maria makes for Antonio, and saves it in his shirt pocket, just like his father. This is evident from the scene of the morning of Antonio’s first day in his new job, when we learn that Bruno is also getting ready for work. 3 In fact, Bicycle Thieves is a pivotal example of the Neorealist deployment of non-professional actors, wherein Staiola’s Bruno offers a natural counterpoint to Maggiorani’s Antonio. 2 From roughly 1942 to 1953, Italian neorealist directors became known for shunning the spaces of film studios in favour of using non-professional actors, natural lighting and location photography, all of which lent the “impression of truth.” A further key aspect was their focus on plots derived from the social world and the lives of the working class. From then on, Bicycle Thieves follows Antonio and his young son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola), on a futile search throughout the streets of Rome.Īccording to the French film critic André Bazin, what makes the unremarkable story of Bicycle Thieves – much like Italian neorealist films in general – so remarkable and satisfying is the uncontrived way it depicts working-class people and their “genuine problems of living” as the basis for a simple and incidental narrative. Even so, as soon as the bicycle is retrieved, it is lost again to a thief during Antonio’s first day on the job. As Antonio laments to his wife about the job he has accepted (but thinks he’s already lost), Maria comes up with a thrifty solution to get the bike back. Antonio is offered a job in the city pasting posters on walls he later tells his wife, Maria (Lianella Carell), that it is a “good job” with a “family allowance”, but one that strictly requires a bicycle – something that he no longer has, having pawned it for food money. Instead, he sits hopelessly off in the distance by a dusty road, with a sparse landscape and crumbling apartments looming overhead, unaware of the bus’s arrival until one of the men from the steps runs to fetch him. Antonio Ricci’s (Lamberto Maggiorani) name is called for work, but he is nowhere to be found. 1īicycle Thieves opens with the arrival of a bus – a sign of life – and the scattering of young men who assemble and follow a government agent to the steps of a makeshift employment office. By the end of World War II, De Sica had begun to transition away from the artificiality of the sanctioned historical melodramas and romantic comedies of the time and towards a way of making films that privileged the experiences of real people. Ladri di biciclette ( Bicycle Thieves, 1948) marked Vittorio De Sica’s eighth directorial credit in a prolific filmmaking career, which had included work produced within the dictates of Italy’s government-controlled cinema during the time of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
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