‘I Fidanzati’ or — Spaces, Absences and Memories?

The narrative to Ermanno Olmi’s ‘I Fidanzati’ (1963), or ‘The Fiancés’, is so slight (a Milanese construction worker reluctantly leaves his fiancée for a job promotion in Sicily, and that’s about it) that you can’t help but marvel at Olmi’s ability to keep you utterly riveted, as well as deeply moved, when so little is apparently happening.

We’re made explicitly aware from the get-go that there’s an unspoken tension between this couple, Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi), and that unresolved tension is carried south with Giovanni when he arrives in Sicily to start his new job (this is one of the few Italian films where we follow someone from the north travelling to the south for employment). When he sleeps he dreams of her, but are these flashbacks, fantasies or memories? We’re never quite sure but they allow us to gradually piece together the reason for the emotional gulf between these two lovers. Yet, even then, the reason isn’t firmly fixed either temporally or spatially.

The longer they remain separated the more remote a possible reunion realistically seems until, that is, some letters are exchanged and all the unsettled doubts, fears and resentments are abolished in a series of oceanic outpourings of love. Still, there’s the lingering nagging uncertainly as to what’s memory, reality and or wished for fantasy, and this slipperiness, along with some beautifully fluid editing, gives ‘I Fidanzati’ a feeling somewhat reminiscent of Alain Resnais.

Yet it’s Olmi’s control of visual story-telling that’s the most arresting. Giovanni might spend the entirety of the movie doing nothing much besides wandering around a Sicilian cityscape that’s in the process of erupting out of the earth, resting in his room or working at the building site but the flow of these images, plus the information they convey, is mesmerising.

There’s an astounding scene where Giovanni and his co-workers are welding at night and it transforms the structure of the incomplete building into a metallic skeleton bathed in an incandescent shower of blinding sparks against complete pitch-blackness. Another example is the field of precisely laid-out pyramids of salt which renders the Sicilian landscape into an environment that’s genuinely otherworldly.

‘I Fidanzati’ does what Olmi does best and that’s being tender, gorgeous and touching without lapsing into sentimentality or cloying cliché. This is seriously beautiful stuff.