I fidanzati (The Fiances)
The ideal artistic form, in some Edenic pre-audience sense, is the essay; in that an essay is only constrained by the interest of its author. That audiences do exist complicates things. You can imagine a perfect confluence of interest, such that an author who is never bored will never bore her audience; but in this fallen world things tend to be nearly the opposite. As an audience the prospect of an author who is utterly pleased with the act of creation is ominous. Even a particularly easeful creator is typically not enthralled with their process – Mozart: “I write music the ways cows piss.”
I fidanzati, directed by Ermanno Olmi and released in 1963, is a simple story. We have a young couple, Giovanni and Liliana. As the title says, they are engaged. Giovanni has the opportunity to accept a transfer for his job. It’s a promotion, better money. Liliana is worried that they will grow apart. But Giovanni goes. What will happen? That’s the story.
But we won’t advance with the steady gait of drama. We will lounge in our chairs, leaf through an old catalogue, stare out the window. In other words we are in the hands of an essayist. Take the opening scene. It’s set at a dancehall, and there is a lot of narrative work to be done. We need to meet Giovanni and Liliana, sense the tension between them, understand where it comes from. There is an intricate series of flashbacks ready to fill us in. Yet – before Olmes begins, he first takes his time with the dancehall. He is interested in how it looks from outside; then how it looks from inside. He likes the clattering sound people’s shoes make on the stone floor. It’s very quiet, no one is talking before the music starts, he uses long shots. Then a man coughs, and the film is startled into a series of cuts – it’s a little essay on editing. We see old faces and young faces. The pianist is blind; the accordion player leads him to the piano, positions him, lights his cigarette. The pianist doesn’t just begin straight on; first he plays a little flourish. Before, the camera stopped for awhile and followed a man tossing handfuls of chalk on the floor. Why? What is he doing? But once the pianist starts in earnest, and the dancers take the floor – they are all excellent dancers, by the way, because they are at home here – we see that the chalk is there to smooth their motion over the loud clattering stone floor. This was interesting to Olmes; and so he put it in the film.
The middle of I fianzati is a long exploration of what it is like to leave home and come to a strange place. Giovanni and Liliana are set aside; we are just with Giovanni. He arrives at night, takes a room at the hotel, can’t sleep – from his balcony he sees a little café, still lit up, music blaring from it. Anyone who has traveled a certain amount has been in the same situation, and may have walked over to investigate the café, or may have gone back to bed. Giovanni walks to the café, and the short scene that plays out there has nothing to do with advancing the plot or even such narrative spadework as establishing a sense of place – it’s just a reward to him and us for his curiosity.
Giovanni settles in. He is working as a welder, and the job is interesting to Olmes (who got his start directing documentaries for a power company), but so is the town, the landscape, the people. This free-floating interest is enabled and encouraged by Italy’s economic condition at the time – semi-industrialized, an old/new hybrid. Activity is not centralized, nor is it packaged efficiently in closed compounds. Public and private spaces overlap; at one point Giovanni strolls casually around an open-air salt plant, the salt collected in rows of cone-shaped piles. The water shuts off at his boarding house on Sundays, but a neighboring woman has set some water aside, and is willing to share it (she wants to cool Giovanni down by pouring some over his back, but he politely declines). We also get a sense of straightened circumstances and class solidarity. We are primarily with laborers; when Giovanni rides in a car with his bosses we feel the gulf between them.
Olmes used non-actors for I fianzati (and for several other of his films); Carlo Cabrini, playing Giovanni, is not called on to emote. He watches, and his character, or his consciousness, often elides into that of Olmes, and of the viewer. It’s a keen way of earning our sympathy; we like Giovanni because he likes looking at things we like to see: fields, the water, old buildings. In the most overtly poetic scene we see a group of welders working at night, their torches dripping sparks.
Eventually we return to Giovanni and Liliana as a couple; but again this is done with an essayist’s touch. We see Liliana giving a speech, about how having been separate, the two of them have learned the value of being together; before they were together but they weren’t communicating. In their new life together they will be more open, and truly know each other. The words and the emotion read as Hollywood idealism; the music, previously a bit playful, swells. Moreover, Giovanni hasn’t come back from his transfer yet, and so it’s unclear what Liliana is talking about, or when she is talking – or if this is really her, or a fantasy of Giovanni’s. It all comes across as something that Olmes is showing us, just something he has on his mind – maybe this is how these characters might end up? Not exactly like this, I’m just spitballing, but I’d like them to be happy together, somehow. The film’s actual end is a shrug – a squall of rain, men running for cover (a shrug is a good way to end an essay).
