#67: Bicycle Thieves
Release Date: November 24th, 1948
Format: Streaming (Max)
Written by: Cesare Zavattini
Directed by: Vittorio De Sica
4 Stars
The definitive Italian Neorealist film and bonafide classic that has been globally adored by film lovers for almost 80 years, and you want me to critique it?
I’ll say a couple of things and then respectfully bow out before I embarrass myself.
It’s a beautifully sad movie, obviously. There are dozens of striking images that stick to your psyche, but my favorite during this viewing was seeing the main character, Antonio, trading his family’s bedsheets in to a pawn shop to redeem his bicycle so he can begin his new job putting up poster advertisements around Rome. The sheets were a wedding gift, and the only sheets they own, so it’s a large sacrifice, both financially and emotionally. After Antonio barters for an additional $500 lira, we see a worker at the pawn shop take their sheets to the back where he climbs a seemingly 30-foot tall rack of stored bed sheets and linen and stuffs Antonio’s sheets into the pile.
Before we even get to the thievery of the bicycle, this seems an apt evocation of the movie’s central theme. Not only were the sheets a wedding gift, a symbol of love and devotion, but bed sheets are symbolic of our humanness. You can imagine that Antonio and his wife, Maria, made love on those sheets and created their son, Bruno. You can imagine that Maria washes them by hand in a heavy bucket of water that she must carry up a steep flight of steps to their third story apartment. You can imagine that on warm Roman summer nights, Antonio and Maria and little Bruno sweat into those bed sheets as they sleep. And because of the brutal conditions affecting the working class in postwar Italy, these symbols of human warmth are commodified and quantified and capitalized.
It evoked in me those images of the Holocaust, where Nazi soldiers would pile shoes in a heap in order to be reused for the war effort.
Another aspect of the film that stood out to me on this viewing is just how effective the title is and how effective the bicycle is as a MacGuffin. It would be one thing for Bicycle Thieves to just be a mood piece, using the Rome cityscape and non-actors to evoke its sense of realism (which it does). But it does more than that. This is a clever, smartly written film. Early in the film, Antonio is trying to find Maria, who is in a building where there is a popular neighborhood psychic (Maria is there to seek answers regarding the family’s future finances). Antonio has to leave his newly acquired bicycle out on the street while he searches the building, and the very fact of the movie’s title creates a sense of tension and dread. We know what this bicycle means to the family, and we know it’s going to get stolen.
It doesn’t get stolen in this scene, but the tension is now building. And by the time we get to the film’s end, when Antonio’s desperation has reached its climax, the title takes on a whole new, devastating meaning.
