For multiplex-frequenting Americans, "I Fidanzati" (The Fiancees) has four-plus strikes against it: it is more than 40 years old, it's in glorious high-contrast black-and-white, it's subtitled, it has little plot and no violence or nudity, and it focuses on a long-distance romance. Nevertheless, I found it a fascinating portrait of the major historical processes of industrialization and delocalization and of a world of repression that I would find difficult to imagine if I didn't remember a similar one from my own long-ago youth.

In "Il Posto" (The Job, 1961) Ermanno Olmi recalled his own submersion in a gigantic company (Edisonvolta, for which he still worked at the time and whose facilities he borrowed in making that, his first feature film). "Il Posto" Olmi juxtaposed the alienation of a boy embarking on lifetime employment in a dead-end job with very faltering attempts at romancing a typist hired at the same time he was. The spaces in which they exist (having practically no life away from work and not much at it) were very keenly observed.

In "I Fidanzati", too, there is much footage documenting a manufacturing facility being built in a barren Sicilian landscape and showing a village in which space has suddenly jumped in value. The company has found the locals unaccustomed to factory discipline (for instance, staying home when it rains, as if still engaged in sharecropping). The film shows a skilled worker (a welder) from Milan promoted to a higher-paying position so long as he relocates for the building of the new factory.

Carlo Cabrini, the nonactor who plays the lead role of Giovanni, looks thirtyish (since he made no other movies IMDB doesn't list a year of birth for him). In addition to a more general wish to get ahead, he undertakes the temporary but prolonged relocation so that he and his long-term fiancée Liliana (Anna Canzi) can finally afford to get married.

The film opens at a dance hall that strikes me as very grim. Young and not-so-young couples dance under the eyes of watchful parents and censorious neighbors. Olmi does not immediately focus on the title characters. When he does bring them to the forefront, it is immediately obvious that Liliana is opposed to Giovanni going off to the primitive South (although she should know that the code of honor and patriarchal policing of womenfolk is even more rigorous than in the urbanized. industrialized North). It is not obvious that either is really in love with the other. Like the younger (sort of a) couple in "Il Posto," Giovanni and Liliana do not communicate with each other very well or very much. She is distrustful, he tries to be placating and explain yet again that he is going away for the two of them. Both seem conscious that the separation may mark the end of their relationship, even though Giovanni intends it to prepare the way for starting their life together.

Liliana underestimated Giovanni's commitment to her (perhaps reflecting the shakiness and of hers to him; he seems more a habit than someone about whom she is passionate). Giovanni underestimated how lonely his sojourn was going to be. He is almost as shy and unassertive as the boy in "Il Posto." Giovanni does not make friends with coworkers form the North of Italy and finds the Sicilians perplexingly alien. When he moves out of the company hotel to a rented room in the village, the landlady comes on to him, but he repulses her advances. He goes alone to the beach. He goes alone to a local fiesta (as uncomfortable as the boy at the New Year's Eve party in "Il Posto"), where a masked reveler takes some pity on him, but will not remove her mask or veil (this sounds heavy-handed symbolism, but didn't feel that way).

Giovanni articulates feelings in letters that he surely was never able to express in person. Liliana (probably fearing that the letter is breaking off relations) is slow to open it, but an epistolary relationship eventually begins in which both assure the other of their devotion—and, implicitly fidelity. (Despite the plural of the title, the film does not show what Liliana is up to back in Milan, only what Giovanni is not up to in Sicily.) As in "Il Posto," the ending leaves open interpretations of hope and of despair.

So, there is not a lot of plot, and it is not certain that the fiancées are closer to marriage (and/or happiness) at the beginning than at the outset. There are no histrionics, no physical intimacy (let alone nudity), no violence (no explosions except a few fireworks at the fiesta). For the 77-minute running time, the audience mostly sees a depressed worker trying to make the best of his emotionally difficult situation, sometimes remembering time with his beloved, regularly trying to reach out to her on the page and by long-distance telephone calls.

As in "Il Posto" (or in "The Bicycle Thief"), the protagonist desperately trying to better his lot, is undemonstrative and runs the gamut of facial expressions from blank to pained. Giovanni is not the passionate (/operatic) expressive Latin lover, but, rather, a frustrated prosaically commonsensical working-man who has been engaged for too long.

Olmi did not want glamorous movie stars (and worked far from the Roman film studios). He recruited non-actors to play characters similar to themselves in real (non-studio) settings. Although I have not seen any of Olmi's industrial documentaries, I'd guess that they are visually impressive, because the shots of landscapes (including the old-fashioned industry of salt extraction and the new high-tech petrochemical plant that Giovanni is helping construct) are stunning. There are also impressive tracking shots (from the days before steadicams). The compositions involving human beings are not quite as striking as those in "Il Posto," but some are striking.

The film restoration is very good (as one expects from Criterion). The DVD includes a demonstration and contrast of unrestored and restored scene (similar to the one on the "Il Posto" DVD). There is also a fairly long theatrical trailer (though not as long as the four-minute "Il Posto" one), and more of a totally fascinating and very engaging interview of Olmi, interspersed with some comments from his recurrent collaborator Tullio Kezich. Alas, unlike the "Il Posto" DVD, the "I Fidanzati" does not include an additional "short." (Since they are likely to remain unavailable to American audiences, another of his later productions for television or one of his earlier industrial documentaries would have enhanced the DVD with its short, commentary-trackless feature film.) Still, what Criterion has put together is well worth seeing for anyone interested in stories of ordinary lives or in the social history of industrialization. (And, after being impressed with the artistry of Olmi's first two feature films, captivated by the interviews with him, and reading Metalluk's praise for it, perhaps I have to give "The Tree of the Wooden Clogs" another chance?)

Oh, yes, in answer to my title question: Absence makes Giovanni even surer that he want to mate for life with Liliana. Being in familiar surroundings, she misses him less acutely than he misses her in alien, alienating ones, but his opening up to her long distance makes her surer of him. Fonder, I'm less sure of.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD