I Fidanzati (1963), a very early entry in filmmaker Ermanno Olmi’s celebrated, decades-spanning career, is a bravura work of neorealism on a par with Vittorio De Sica, a fragmented yet utterly grounded narrative about a Milanese couple, Giovanni and Liliana, whose engagement is strained and nearly snapped by Giovanni’s departure to Sicily for a steel-industry job that pays too well for him to turn it down.
The film’s sublimity lies in its artful synthesis of sympathy and simplicity; in its coolly deliberate complications of linear time, which afford us access to the lovers’ own frustrations of expectation and desire; and, perhaps above all, in the quality of tender, bored, doubt-addled longing so exquisitely articulated by its lead performers, Carlo Cabrini and Anna Canzi.
–Matthew Martens
I Fidanzati, (1963), dir. Ermanno Olmi
77 min. Italian with English subtitles