The Fiances

An engaged couple finds their love put to the test when one is reassigned to a job in a distant location. What sounds like a mundane premise for a romantic drama becomes a moving meditation on memory and culture in Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati (1962) now released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. I Fidanzati was released in Great Britain as The Engagement and in the United States as The Fiances. Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) and Liliana (Anna Canzi) are the couple who we first see in a dancehall in northern Italy. It is their last dance together before he leaves for a new job in Sicily far to the south. She is nervous and upset, wondering whether he will forget her. However, Giovanni is the one that ends up pining for her after he reaches Sicily. Put in a bare bones hostel, lonely and bored, he dreams of their time together in flashbacks and imagines what their lives could be in fantasies. In his third feature film, Milanese filmmaker Ermanno Olmi goes beyond the documentary-like style of his previous film Il Posto (The Job, 1961). However, as with that movie, Olmi is most intrigued by the stresses people endure in the modern, industrial world. Here Giovanni and Liliana have their relationship threatened by Giovanni's job, separating them in a way that only war would have done in the pre-industrial world. That agrarian, more stable society is all around Giovanni in Sicily. His co-workers from up north constantly complain about the Sicilians, how they stop working whenever it rains or how they quit their jobs as soon as they have saved enough to buy a small farm. The Sicilians, however, seem far more alive than their northern counterparts. A Sicilian festival Giovanni attends is an explosion of fireworks, drinking, dancing and hints of romance. By contrast, the dance in the northern ballroom with which the movie begins seems more funereal than celebratory. As with his previous films, Olmi uses non-professional actors and their performances are wonderful. "These people - bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of truth that, provoked by the situations in which the characters find themselves, creates palpitations, those vibrations so right, so real, and therefore not repeatable. At the twentieth take, the actor still cries. The real actor, the character taken from life, won't do more than four repetitions. It's like capturing a light: either you get it at that moment or you don't get it at all." Olmi must have a way of getting the performances he needs from these non-actors. He certainly has a way of capturing feeling in beautiful, haunting shots, whether they show a man tossing handfuls of sand across a dance floor or a shower of sparks from a blowtorch illuminating a steel framework. There is more use of music here than in previous Olmi films, with a fine score by Gianni Ferrio who uses dance rhythms to remind us of the woman Giovanni left behind in that dancehall. The DVD features a stunningly beautiful black-and-white print of I Fidanzati, in both regular letterbox and 16X9 format for widescreen televisions. There is an on-camera discussion of the film with Olmi and his friend and collaborator Tullio Kezich. The original trailer is also included along with an essay by critic Kent Jones. The Criterion Collection's new DVD helps draw attention to an almost-forgotten film that transforms a trite situation into a story that is moving and powerful. For more information about I Fidanzati, visit Criterion Collection. To order I Fidanzati, go to TCM Shopping. by Brian Cady