Bicycle Thieves (1948)

I re-watched Bicycle Thieves (dir. de Sica) and the second time around it was even better than the first time. A gritty social realist movie about a society driven by dog-eat-dog. Post-war Rome. A man looks for a job, but the job he finds requires that he has a bike. A bike is expensive, but he acquires one and starts to work. His bike is stolen after a little while, and together with his young son, he tries to catch the thief. No luck. The man's miserable state worsens as he tries to steal a bike himself, and has to deal with being pointed out as a thief. The man's odyssey takes him to a crowded marked, a church and a restaurant. de Sica focuses as much on the life of the streets as the story, which makes this film a thrillingly bustling affair. In one of the best scenes, the father decides that they should sit down in a restaurant and celebrate for a bit. In the table next to them, a rich bunch of people gobbles food and the small kid longingly gazes at their abundance of tasty food. Bicycles thieves is a restrained film. There is little sentimentality or attempts at humor. The dramatic events are not dramatic in the ordinary sense, where we are eager to see whether the looming catastrophy will actualize. In this film, there are plenty of situations that have a particular open-endedness to them, the kind of open-endedness that characterize human encounters. We never quite know what will happen next; it's not the kind of film that builds on straight narrative moves. Bicycle Thieves is about humiliation, but also about defiance and single-mindedness, perhaps. The man won't give up: he runs through the street, and it is hard not to care about his quest, or about the boy who witnesses his father's humiliation, and how is dragged along in the city on this impossible mission. - - - Lots of times, I thought about how this film is such a great inspiration for other good directors, the Dardenne brothers in particular, just think about Rosetta's anxious battle against unemployment and how the Dardenne brothers conjure up her stubborn defiance. Both films never adopt the quasi-neutral, almost disdainful gaze some forms of documentary-like cinema is plagued by: every second of both films is characterized by moral engagements. Moral engagement never preaches, it shows, evokes, brings forth.