A Long Engagement

The Fiances, tight-lipped and unhappy, sit side by side on hard-bottom chairs and look anywhere but at each other. Engaged for several years, they have recently been drifting apart. Now he wants to run off to Sicily and take a better job. She is sure that if he goes he will never come back, and he is secretly inclined to agree.

They are both wrong. In the second of his films to be shown in the U.S., Italy's Ermanno Olmi (The Sound of Trumpets) tells a gentle and touching story of how distance lends enchantment to a love that had lost its charm. More to the point, he tells the story with inordinate art; film buffs everywhere acknowledge The Fiances as a classic of the new cinema.

Olmi's hero (Carlo Cabrini) is a welder, an ordinary workingman: doomed to his job, tied to his home town. Sicily seems to him an inhospitable place. The company hotel looks like a concrete waffle. The nearest town is huts and ruts. The local night life is limited to a single soda fountain of soul-searing fluorescence. After three weeks in this hell, the miserable welder imagines home as heaven and his fiancee (Anna Canzi) as an angel. When she sends him a letter, he greets it like an annunciation. Eagerly he replies, and soon the fiances are writing regularly, soon a new green leaf of feeling grows from the dead branch of their love.

Not much of a story. What's more, it is told with a slowness slowed still further by memories in the form of flashbacks. But slow is not dull. Slow in this film is fascinating, as a big slow snake is fascinating. Slow is the director's way of giving the spectator time to experience the story as life is experienced: moment by moment and yet somehow also as a simultaneous entirety. At 32, Olmi is a master of his complex craft, but he wisely uses his art to conceal his art and to reveal what he means to say.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.