“The Fiancés” (I Fidanzati), from 1963 (which I discuss in this clip) is the Italian director Ermanno Olmi’s third feature. Like his two prior ones, “Time Stood Still” (which I’ve never seen) and “Il Posto” (The Job), from 1961, this one is set in a milieu that he knows well: the world of technology and industry. Throughout the nineteen-fifties, Olmi (who was born in 1931) worked for the electric company Edisonvolta in Milan and, according to filmreference.com, worked as “director and supervisor of over forty shorts and documentaries” for that company between 1952 and 1961. “Il Posto” tells the story of a batch of applicants who seek work in a big urban technology company and go through a comically exasperating battery of physical, intellectual, and psychological tests. There, the young man who is its protagonist meets a fellow applicant, a young woman with whom he falls quickly in love. Olmi’s camera looks at her with a wide-eyed, breathless admiration; I was unfamiliar with the actress, whose name is Loredana Detto. Olmi married her, and she never acted again.
In “The Fiancés,” Olmi covers similar turf: A young man works as a laborer in a Milan industrial-technological concern and is offered a promotion if he accepts a transfer to the Sicily plant, and the young woman, his fiancée, fears that their relationship won’t withstand the separation. It’s remarkable to consider it alongside the previous film; “Il Posto” tells the story in a straightforward, quasi-documentary fashion (though the control and precision of his images betrays significant forethought and planning), whereas “The Fiancés” audaciously fragments the storytelling, with flashbacks and interior monologues, dream sequences and subjective camera work, to conjure his characters’ inner lives.
At the same time, Olmi devotes meticulous documentary attention to the characters’ material surroundings; the tension between their visual experience and their states of mind is a remarkable leap of modernist inspiration, one that seems both to be influenced by the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and that surprisingly foreshadows Antonioni’s next film, “Red Desert,” from 1964. The modern world jangled the Italian soul in ways that its filmmakers understood best—and that they created new forms to show.
