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  • Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
  • Torunn Haaland
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette). Vittorio De Sica, dir. Starring Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola. Criterion Collection, 2007 (1948). 2 DVDs + 76-page booklet featuring essays by Godfrey Cheshire, Charles Burnett, André Bazin, and Cesare Zavattini, and remembrances by Vittorio De Sica and his collaborators. $39.95.

Fifty years after its release, Bicycle Thievesstrikes us as a much more modern film than the specificity of its socio-historical anchorage would suggest. De Sica's commitment to postwar Italy's most underprivileged presupposes a critical exposition of events, but his aesthetic ideal of poetic realism, and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini's apparently antithetical vision of a cinematic chronicle, tend rather towards de-dramatized and ambiguous hic et nunc. What will happen after two day's futile search for a stolen bike is therefore left unresolved, leaving the last shots to dwell on the two desolate city-walkers as they merge with the indolently moving crowd, so indifferent to their needs, and with the film's languid texture, so embracive instead of their tacit despair and solidarity. Behind them rises the city, officially at the verge of modernity and industrialization; ahead of them lay underdeveloped outskirt areas still entangled within struggles of the past. De Sica's Rome resides between what it is and what it wants to be, a dialectics dramatized through the hardships of an unskilled worker, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) who over the past two days—89 minutes of cinema time—has seen his father rise and fall from disillusioned and unemployed, to proudly employed, to (un?)employed bicycle-thief humiliated beyond belief.

The anti-cinematic story of a bike starts in the scarcely spectacular Val Melaina, one of postwar Rome's geographically and socially most displaced areas. The massive, rudimentary apartment complex thrown into a deserted field is a housing project fascist planners started, and evidently never finished, in order to dislocate the lower classes and reserve the inner city areas for the respectable middle class. 1The result, as Antonio's endless commuting demonstrates, resonates in the postwar years as deprivation not only of decent housing conditions, but also of [End Page 463]access to the few jobs available in the city centre. After two years' unemployment, luck selects him out of a crowd of disillusioned men; but the position as billposter requires a bike and his is pawned. Antonio curses his destiny, and it is his far more practical wife, Maria (Lianella Carell) who resolves to convert their bed linen so that he can present himself to his new boss with the essential vehicle, while she goes to thank a fake psychic for having predicted his sudden change in fortune. De Sica failed in convincing a fortune teller known in Rome as La Santona (Great Saintess) to star as herself in this episode, but the performance he got from Ida Bracci Dorati—like the rest of the cast, not a professional actor—vividly suggests what function entrepreneurially-minded wise-women played in postwar times of loss and destruction. 2Although La Santona was included mostly as a token of popular Roman folklore, she becomes crucial to the development of Antonio's character when he, who initially disapproved of Maria's credulousness, eventually turns to her ridiculous predictions for help.

Both a heroic victim of social injustice and an inert, irresolute anti-hero, Antonio's misfortunes begin the following morning when he is busy covering antique walls with promotional posters for Gilda(1946). Inherent in the ironic allusion to the illusionist cinema Bicycle Thievescategorically rejects, there is also an authorial recognition that, once the wartime ban on foreign film was lifted, Hollywood bombshells fared way better at national box offices than angry Italian cineastes. Antonio would know nothing about this, but he gets so absorbed in his first assignment that he fails to see the men surrounding him until one of them rolls away with his bike, leaving him alone with a distorted Rita Hayworth. As one of the film's first and still most influential critics, André Bazin, observed, this is a world in which "the poor must steal from...

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