I was conscious of many, many single moments that collaborated to bring us the
imagery of crowds and what they mean. The sequence where the bike is actually taken
has the father pitted against everyone from the actual thief, to the driver, to even the man
who was in cahoots with the thief. It’s an excellent scam and well planned. Later in the
film, when the father sees his chance to steal back his mode of transportation - he uses
the crowd, but he is no born thief. He is quickly apprehended and the crowd only seems
to grow up around him, each pointing their finger and shaming him. I also noted that as
he goes into the sunsoaked alley (where the bike radiates the notion that it is ripe to be
plucked) the father becomes a silhouette; he is without features and ceases to be the man
he once was. As soon as his features are recognizable again, he has emerged a hypocrite,
a miserable failure and a sub par father. And, again, he is wading knee deep in one of
Rome’s many crowds.

     There’s an odd vein that throbs in the back of my head while screening ‘The
Bicycle Thief’ to the tune of finding “a needle in a stack of needles”. There is never any
feeling flowing through the film that this bicycle will actually turn up. Is it because
neo-realist films are often unresolved - or is it specifically engineered to create this
maddening atmosphere where everyone around the father is seen to be against the father?

     I also was able to feel a certain metaphorical significance from the film’s strange
deification of the bicycle. It seems that it’s more than just the father’s livelihood. In my
film chronicle, I called it : “...a metaphor for the singularity and uniqueness of chance,
the circumstance that befalls everyone - even though everyone has a these limitations,
they are certainly painful and, in most cases, shape us”. I think it’s a bit more than that.
It’s not as ambitious as the bike standing for poverty in Italy, or the bike standing for that
last chance for survival before your spirit becomes squashed and unable to function. It’s
hard to put my finger on, which is the point. The bike is a metaphor, but if it were more
articulated (such as the bike stands for one thing and one thing only), the softness of it’s
symbol and the flexibility of it wouldn’t be nearly as effective or powerful. It calls to
mind what the great experimental filmmaker Maya Derrin once said about “inanimate
objects” being of a “malevolent vitality”. Even straddling aside the rapturous
photography and the dark, draining story line - it’s the bike that sticks in your mind. It’s
as if it were the most important character in the film for too many reasons to name.

    The exquisite photography dotting De Sicca’s favorite of his films serves perhaps two
purposes. It certainly stands as reason for this to be the diametric opposite of his last film
in so much as it’s composition seems to be largely close-ups where there would have
been long shots in ‘The Bicycle Thief’. On another level still, the close-ups make
‘Umberto D.’ an intimate film - though it’s quiet, personal quest remains part of it’s
downfall - of somewhat more modest proportions.

     The type of film more commonly employed in the cinema today than was in the
forties, that is, where a character spends the majority of the film searching for the
unimaginable sum of money he needs to restore the comfort and order of his life before
whatever dark vacuum came along to ransack that contentment. ‘Umberto D.’, sadly,
seems to awkwardly straddle that sort of film and the metonymical thrust of the waning
neorealist movement where Umberto stands for the elderly, squeezed into lonely and
dangerous positions by lack of pension funds and, it seems, evil landladies. (Of course
I’m making light with that last remark - but doesn’t it feel just a little too convenient that
his landlady has such an anti-Umberto stance? And is it meant to be garishly ironic that
in a film conceived in 1949, Umberto is being bullied by a woman?). So completely
aimed at being a personal film, De Sicca’s politics crowd the biographical satisfaction we
almost get to take with us when we leave Umberto’s world.

     I did admire a great deal of the content of this film. Umberto is a man wandering
through a world where everything costs him : from his money to his dog to his health,
there is always a price to pay. And what sticks in that kind of dismal life is how symbolic
it is that he won’t simply move out of his home and into another. It transcends something
deeper than the stubbornness that is characteristic of geriatric folk. Umberto has already
resigned to a higher cause. When he says “How nice not to do anything”, the tinges of
loneliness and serenity have cinched it : Umberto has the “run-out-the-clock” mentality;
he has consigned to die in one place and one place only. As an immovable rock, the
challenge of De Sicca is clearly to move him - which he does. And just like in ‘The
Bicycle Thief’ when we know he’ll never recover the bike, we know damn well Umberto
is never going to get enough money to pay off his rent - and even if he does, we suspect
his landlady will throw him out anyway. That kind of hopelessness is hard to watch - and
certainly hard to endure. Umberto is the kind of down-on-his-luck, rhythmic guy movies
are built around.

     So then, after thoughts of suicide and a devastating attempt at such a
commitment, as the stationery rock, Umberto moves. If only the film didn’t take it down
to such a depressive, singular conclusion : he has to stay alive for his dog.  And it is this
manipulative, sympathy-grabbing ending that utterly cripples the movie. There is more
resolution present than registered in ‘The Bicycle Thief’ (at least we know, of all things,
that Umberto hasn’t killed himself and isn’t on the outs with his faithful companion). But
that static shot, of a man who has earned back the trust of his mutt; what does that say, if
anything? Perhaps it’s the idea that he’s tried to end a part of himself, and since it didn’t
work, he’s going to run and frolic until the end, instead of staying in the place where he
had been living. This is all fine, but where is the sequence showing the result, the
cathartic force of such an epiphany? Where is the moment after he’s gained back the trust
of his dog and has finished frolicking in which Umberto says : “You know, I think I can
make something of the rest of my life. Maybe life, it seems, means a little bit more”.
Since none of this is present, I’ll have to follow the notion that De Sicca means for us to
take Umberto’s acceptance of the bright side of life in passing - as if it would pass. It’s
the cynical notion that Umberto may have one or two things to distract him from how
miserable he is for the time being, but soon enough, he’ll be approaching the train tracks
or staring down through the window, contemplating a good jump.

     I couldn’t help but calling to mind the Belgian film ‘Rosetta’ (1999), a film I felt
played like an allegory of nothing at all, an intimate study that goes about an inch into the
surface, hits rock and comes back up for air - only to realize it’s choking on it’s own
sentimentality. ‘Umberto D.’ wasn’t quite that severe, but the same idea played through
my head as I watched : I’d like to take this as a tragicomedy, but it’s too tragic and
reflexive to laugh out loud. I remember pondering to myself where a film like ‘Rosetta’
might have emerged - the producers have clearly seen ‘Umberto D.’, as their suicide
scenes are equally out of sorts and hollow. But, of course, it’s more than that. I wondered
to myself how could I label ‘Rosetta’? ‘Umberto D.’ has made it clear to me that
‘Rosetta’ is a neo-realist film in it’s own way. And I’m of the opinion now that they’re
almost as difficult to do properly as romantic comedies are.

    It no contest that ‘L’America’ is a relic (or, more appropriately, a recreation) of
neo-realism. Though personally I feel that if not for it’s visual nature, it would be a lesser
film, ‘L’America’ certainly has no trouble carrying its heavy load of a story through the
minefields of digression which could have made it sappy or otherwise undeserving of the
term saved for “new moral poetry”.

     There are a great deal of films in recent release which explore modern postwar
attitudes, many focusing on singular entities that stand for national sensibilities. What’s
fascinating - and rather likeable - about ‘L’America’ is that it builds its own particular
riff on Albanian refugees out of point blank scam. As an audience, it’s almost an
understood fact that we’ll know little to nothing about the friction between Italy and
Albania, the toppling Communism of Albania or the dark world that consumed its
inhabitants. But we react to a story about moral scruples - about men who plan to steal
government grants from a new and struggling country and how their choice in which
local to use as a front for their mock-company will backfire and afford one of them the
opportunity to see the effects of and continuing suffering that had gone on right under his
nose for so many years. This is the kind of story we are roused by and - however familiar
the father-son camaraderie issues, the “now-I-understand” mentality and the use of shock
value in images and facts - setting a film like this up as a scam, rebuilding Gino (a
degenerate character) and properly erecting a delusion within Spiro (a very old man) are
all excellent strategies for making a tired point, or telling a labored story with a fresh
spin.

 However, its the imagery that really tells the story more than anything else. For
days afterward, gritty rectangles of the desert and washed-out shots of a tanker (think of
a coffin ship, only in the present day) stuck with me. It’s not often that films leave that
indelible a mark on me, the kind where specific images appear in my mind. Somewhat
fitting, in fact, for a film entitled ‘L’America’ (America), that the cinematography would
tell the story and that the actual reference the title makes would be the most obtuse and
sought after (it’s not completely revealed until the final moments) - how American in
technique.

 Nevertheless, particularly in the opening scenes, when Fiore is in the former
Communist prison, the lack of embellishment that dots neo-realist films was all over the
place. I’m always taken by films with no heroes, but the idea that men who’ve lived most
of their lives in the dark could descend on Fiore, hand-held camera pulling back through
the crowd (that was harrowing)- this was one of those candid moments where its clear
that the social forces that have forged these men cannot easily be extinguished inside
them.

 I remember wondering, as I watched the film, if it were going to be a film about
institutionalization. I think in some respects (as in ‘Umberto D.), it is. Spiro, who was
imprisoned for fifty years, is clearly the exception to the rule (as he escapes from routine
deceptively) and Gianni, whose character is meant to learn, learn, learn from his journey,
is not going to be a demonstration of a figure broken by habit; it’s the background, I
think, that’s stuck in its past patterns. Wastelands, dilapidated buildings and strange,
cynical countrymen all seem to be operating as if they were just released from prison -
and can’t wait until they’re thrown back in. The idea that restrained suffering is better
than chaotic freedom is, perhaps, a theme that’s hinted at more than anything between
the two main characters - but is rampant in scenes that take place in former prisons, with
rows of armed guards and overcrowded, inconvenient transportation methods (a truck
and boat filled to the brim, a wheel-less jeep, like a monolith).

 This is a film that’s less about rebuilding than about a character realizing this
mammoth unpleasantness that he’s always known existed, now has a face and a feeling.
It’s about denial of reconciliation and petty robbery of lifeblood that lapses into an
introverted fantasy. And beyond all that - it’s a statement of neo-realism transplanted into
a time that’s often too close for comfort.