Bicycle Thieves (1948)

 Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves"

Vittorio De Sica's 1948 masterpiece "Bicycle Thieves" is without a doubt one of the most influential films in history. In many ways, its purity and excellence is what brought the Italian neo-realist movement into its final stages. It was impossible to replicate and impossible to improve upon. It was the pinnacle of the movement and even expressed coherent and simple truths not just about the post-war state of Italy, but of the post-war state of global society.

The film centers on Antonio, a man desperate for work. He is offered a job hanging posters throughout the city, on the condition that he owns a bicycle. After his wife sells the family's bedsheets, Antonio buys his bike. While on the job, a man steals his bike (with the careful assistance of another man). Antonio and his young son Bruno spend the remainder of the film desperately searching for the missing bike. After confronting a man he believes to have stolen the bike, the local community badger him and force him to leave. Even the police tell him there's nothing they can really do. Antonio, out of fear of losing his job, reaches a breaking point and attempts to steal another man's bike. A group of people chase him down and confront him. The owner of the bike is about to call the police when he sees Bruno crying out to his father. The man declines to call the police and lets Antonio go free. Antonio and Bruno walk down the street, full of tears.

The first thing to note about "Bicycle Thieves" is its time and setting. The film is set contemporarily during a post-World War I Rome. De Sica wanted to portray the poverty and unemployment of post-war Italy. He loosely based his film on the few plot details he could remember from the Luigi Bartolini book of the same name. In keeping with the intentionality of the neo-realist movement (along with the very real problem of lack of funds that many Italian filmmakers were dealing with), De Sica used real locations and real, non-professional actors. Many of the non-professional actors' lives even paralleled to what was happening in the story, providing so much additional dimensions in realism. De Sica stated he wanted to "uncover the drama of everyday life." 

It is quite incredible how simple the story is and yet how much emotional power comes from this simplicity. The losing of Antonio's bike affects his economic well-being, along with his family's. Through this, the finding of the bike becomes a matter of life and death. Every action is a matter of survival. 

Along the way in attempting to find the bike, we become inundated with the climate of the post-war landscape of both Italy itself and the new reality of a global society. In the fallout of war, economic turmoil thrives. Finding and keeping a means to make money becomes a necessity for survival. Because of this, the lower class and other economically troubled individuals have to turn on each other in order to get their fair share. Antonio and his son Bruno learn this the hard way along their journey. Their journey to find this source of income becomes an odyssey. They walk through the city of Rome viewing the various segments of the population and how those segments are dealing with the chaos and uncertainty. There are money-making schemes on every corner. They visit a market with bike parts, presumably stolen bike parts. They visit a church offering a free shave and a free lunch with membership. They visit a fortune-teller telling people her visions for a price. They witness crowds of people at a football game. Everywhere you look are cathedrals dedicated to taking people's money. And people are more than happen to provide this money in exchange for a desperate attempt to escape from the harsh reality of their lives. In this way, Antonio and Bruno, along with the viewers themselves, stroll through the ruins of society viewing the new order of consumerist and capitalist enterprise that has taken root. Antonio cannot fight against the new enterprise, however. He, along with everyone else, is too economically dependent on the structure for survival. I noticed how even more dystopian this concept becomes with the plain, identical apartment complexes that house these economically dependent people. In this way, we the viewer visually tag along to this misadventure into uncovering a new economic scope of post-war life. It is a dystopia, full of people desperate for both income and something to satiate their fear and anxiety and full of thieves, con artists, and swindlers ready and eager to take advantage of their fellow man in the sake of their own survival in the process.

This point becomes ultimately clear with the film's finale. After Antonio's long odyssey of trying to locate his bike, he sees this new dystopia and by the end, realizes he cannot get ahead. The dystopia has prevented him from advancing any further. And it seems that everyone else he interacts with has adapted to this new system. While watching the film, I became very paranoid that every other character was secretly out for their own gain. I began to trust no one, seeing everyone else as having an agenda. And perhaps they did. When an entire society is economically trapped with no escape, there is no other alternative than to simply survive. And survival means morally corrupted decisions made to protect yourself. In the end, Antonio was no different. When backed into his corner, Antonio had to act. This act turned him into the very bicycle thief he was attempting to locate the entire film. He was no better than the man who stole his bike. In the end, everyone is out for themselves out of necessity. After this desperate attempt by Antonio, he has becomes just another bicycle thief in a world of bicycle thieves. 

This is why there has been some debate as to the very name of the film. On its original release in Italy, the film was titled "Ladri di Biciclette," which literally translates to "thieves of bicycles." The title has a plurality for both "thieves" and "bicycle." However, when the film was released in the U.S., the title was changed to "The Bicycle Thief." I would argue that by changing the title of the film from plural to singular, you are missing the point of the film entirely. The point of the plurality of the 'thieves' in the film title is that every character in the film is a thief. They are all thieves, including Antonio. Even more so, we the viewers are also the thieves. Because any one of us would become the thief in order to survive, feed our family, etc. There is no singular thief, but rather an entire world of thieves. 

At the climax of the film, it becomes clear that Antonio will never find his bike. Him and his family will never be able to better their economic circumstances. And now Antonio has morally corrupted himself in the eyes of his son. It is perhaps one of the saddest endings in film history. Tears streaming down the face of Bruno as he sees his father stoop to his lowest point. It is the utter desolation of circumstances that makes you cry. The hopelessness. The inability to do anything about their circumstances. It is a film that drags you along a life-or-death mission of securing a mundane item and along the way, shows you the fabric of a morally corrupt post-war landscape. In the end, this new landscape is all consuming. Our characters are unable to escape from it, just as we are unable to escape. The characters in the final shot are us. Their hopelessness is our hopelessness. Their desolation is our desolation. We are nothing but morally corrupted people in a world full of morally corrupted people, not because of who we are internally, but because of the necessity of the destitute circumstances we find ourselves in.