The Bicycle Thief (1949)

Happy President's Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie!    This is considered one of the greatest films of all time but it left me completely cold.  That's more a criticism of my frame of mind and not the movie, however.

Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is one of thousands of Italian men unemployed in the wake of WWII.  Everyday he lines up with dozens of his countrymen to find out if any work is available.  One day, a breakthrough happens.  Antonio is offered a job hanging posters around the city, but it is only available if he has a bicycle.  He had to hock his bike to buy food and reluctantly tells his wife (Lianella Carell).  She agrees to pawn their good sheets, part of her dowry, in order to get his bike out.  While up a ladder hanging a poster of Rita Hayworth, Antonio's bike is stolen.  Frantic to not lose his job, which will probably mean homelessness for his family, Antonio takes his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) with him to search all over Rome for his stolen bike.

Here's the thing.  I have been that poor, where everything that could go wrong has, and you stay awake nights desperately trying to think of ways to get out from under the weight of your debts, where playing the lotto sounds like a sound financial idea and every month is a coin flip on whether you can have electricity or water because you can't keep both turned on at the same time.  I know that feel.

And here's this movie, that puts it all there in black and white.  Figuratively and literally.  You can see Bruno's desire to have the same things as middle-class people when they go into a restaurant to eat and he keeps looking at a boy his age who probably has never gone to bed hungry.  Antonio makes fun of Maria giving money to a fortune-teller but finds himself knocking on that woman's door with all the other unfortunates, desperate to believe that someone has the answers.

I've never been one of those people that enjoys neorealism in my narratives.  If I want reality, I'll watch a documentary.  I watch movies to see fantastic events played by beautiful people.  They don't always have to have a happy ending but they need to engage my imagination.  The Bicycle Thief engaged memory and that's just not what I'm looking for right now.