‘Il Posto’ or — “Rational Madness”?
Despite Ermanno Olmi’s ‘Il Posto’ (1961) opening text describing how families migrated from rural areas of Italy to industrial Milan in search of employment heavily suggesting we could be in for an experience similar to ‘Rocco and His Brothers’ (1960) the two films couldn’t be more different. Whereas Visconti’s epic is all emotional histrionics and operatic melodrama Olmi’s film tackles the subject from the opposite approach by focusing on the understated, the unspoken and the steadfastly quotidian.
A young man, Domenico, who is barely out of his childhood, applies for an office job and is taken on by the company. During the lengthy assessment and interview process he meets a young woman, Antonietta, and the two quickly bond. And that’s it. Nothing else of any earth-shattering consequence happens, but that’s also what makes ‘Il Posto’ so captivating and intensely moving because despite appearing to be merely passively observing what we’re really witnessing is an incredibly strong command of visual story-telling. That and some of the most astonishing black and white cinematography imaginable.
This might be best represented in the film’s most unbearably adorable scene where Domenico and Antonietta go for coffee. Again, nothing of any importance appears to be occurring: they buy coffee, smile at each other and Domenico drops his spoon. Yet we soon discover this coffee serves a vitally important function — it has made them late!
What follows is an intensely exhilarating sequence as they dash through the streets of Milan navigating crowded traffic, countless people and modernist buildings in an attempt to return to the office in time, and yet throughout all this Olmi quietly draws our attention to the fact that they are holding hands. In the middle of an alienating cityscape and under constant pressure from the clock a fleeting human connection has been made, its ephemeral nature making it all the more powerful.
From here on we feel ourselves somewhat unnerved as we’re now desperate for these two kids to get together and so are constantly waiting for the inevitable disruptor to occur that’ll destroy, or solidify, this young love. Yet we can sense from Olmi’s style that he won’t be resorting to any easy melodramatic clichés. No former lover will spring-up unannounced. No tragic accident will suddenly occur. Instead, what happens is life and work go on and the fact that there are no surprises on the horizon might be the saddest fate of all.
Milan might offer employment but it is a world of feedback systems, temporal rigidity, glass and steel architecture and dehumanising cybernetics. Domenico’s workplace (it’s only towards the end that we realise we don’t really know what it is his company actually does) is such a place of endless grey corridors and grey people that it wouldn’t be out of place in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985), so the question ultimately becomes not so much can love exist within such conditions but if even any glimmer of humanity can?
Olmi’s ‘Il Posto’ very much feels like a link between post-war neorealism and the Kafka-esque films of Elio Petri as we sense the shift from a way of life previously rooted in community and land into the realms of the abstract and practically insane. Yet there is always that constant flicker of hope that you’ll make eye contact with someone who makes you smile and that might just be enough to get you through the day… or maybe even a life. It’s an extraordinary movie.
