Bicycle Thieves (1948)

 "You live, and you suffer."

I am, unsurprisingly, going to praise this film.It is, after all, a known classic of cinema. It's a masterpiece of Italian neo-realism, a meditation on both the despair and the suffering of truly grinding poverty and the uncaring nature of society.Yet, for a film with a run time of less than ninety minutes, the fact is that it's quite slow, uneventful and challenging.

I like arthouse films, including avant garde ones, and I don't routinely struggle to hold my attention as I did with this. Perhaps it's the realism, the lack of spectacle,of something weird or overtly artistic to stimulate the mind.... athough the visual of all those men on theitr bikes, carrying ladders, was certainly arresting.

And yet, I can't justly criticise the film for this. It's visual poetry, and the slow pace is the point. Antonio depends on his bicycle to keep his precarious job by which he can feed his wife and young children. The theft of this precious object destroys his world, and as the film unfolds we see both his desperation and the sheer impossibility of finding a stolen bicycle. There's no hope for him.

And yet the film is also about Antonio's relationship with his little son, Bruno. He's not a perfect father, none of us are, but he's a decent man under trying circumstances. And yes, the ending packs quite the punch. 

Not, perhaps, an entertaining film. But a most worthy one.