The Fiancés

Giovanni works as a welder in Milan. The company offers him a job at a new plant in Sicily: better money, better position, eighteen months away. Things with his fiancée Liliana are already exhausted, and he decides to go. Ermanno Olmi builds the film not around the separation itself but around the time spent inside it. Giovanni's days in Sicily are nearly identical: the plant, a meal, waiting for a letter, walking around a town he does not know. The editing keeps jumping back, and the two times mix, which is exactly how the arrangement works in his head. The actors are not professionals and the film looks at things almost documentarily: the distance between north and south, the hollowness industrialisation leaves in small towns, and how thin a relationship conducted by letter becomes. The difficulty is that almost nothing happens, there is little speech, and the film arrives nowhere. Who it is for: admirers of Italian realism. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for narrative.