I Fidanzati
aka The Fiancés First screened and reviewed in September 2025
Director: Ermanno Olmi. Cast: Carlo Cabrini, Anna Calzi, and so many eye-catching but unnamed Italians. Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi. In Brief:
Modestly sized but exquisitely crafted portrait of ambivalence that still feels like a paean to romance—and to cinema.
VOR:⑤
Olmi, best-known at home but still a titan of his generation, manages to enlist some major revolutions in film style for a miniaturist sketch.
(for Paola, my favorite Milanese, and one of my favorite people, period)
The titular fiancés of Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati, Carlo Cabrini's Giovanni and Anna Canzi's Liliana, are two young Milanese lovers who might be harboring some qualms as their wedding nears, or might suspect the other of qualms, or both, or neither. When Giovanni takes a job monitoring a construction site in faraway Sicily, he insists it's a good moneymaking opportunity, and important not just to advancing but to retaining his job; there are at least ten other workers of the same rank who, he insists, would leap at the opportunity if he spurned it, and his prospects would never recover. But Liliana clearly suspects a desire to be away from her. Giovanni is outwardly frustrated by her suspicion, but the film grammar also allows us to access his internal sorrow. Their love isn't perfect, nor is anybody's, but from what we can tell, he cares very much for her. His reminiscences, at least, are more often in a key of fondness than regret. Is that enough to help them last?
The majority of this poignant, delicately shaped, 75-minute movie stays with Giovanni amid his off-site gig in Sicily, which is only two or three days long. Much of the external action is captured by Olmi's active camera in neorealist, documentary-adjacent style, though these passages are interrupted—sometimes for a split-second, sometimes for several minutes—by temporally disordered illustrations of Giovanni's wandering thoughts. These mostly play as memories, but it's not impossible that at least some are daydreams, or fantasy scenes, positively or negatively distorted from whatever the couple's time together has been like. I'd go so far as to say that the magnetic but wary lovers of I Fidanzati aren't just Giovanni and Liliana but the two, predominating forms of midcentury modern European filmmaking, here betrothed: 1) the barely varnished, Bicycle Thieves-y collages of postwar street life and working-class endurance amid recuperating landscapes, increasingly energized for better or worse by capital; and 2) the associative, Resnais-style slipstreams of interior states and elusive events. That first tradition is defined by the revised attentions and delaminated frankness of the camera, the second by innovations in rhythm and montage, so I don't think it's wrong to also see the ambivalent union at I Fidanzati's center as a figural restaging of cinema's age-old, often-fraught bond between cinematography and editing. Or maybe you'll find yourself pondering more the uneasy but tantalizing alliance between fiction and nonfiction storytelling, since Olmi has orchestrated such an absorbing stylistic mix of both.
I Fidanzati teems with many other characters, several of them named and foregrounded in several dramatic scenes. Nevertheless, Cabrini and Canzi are the only performers listed in the credits. Everyone else in Olmi's employ has been offered as colorful, variegated, but anonymous backdrop. I'd like to be able to acknowledge these men and women by name, but I guess I take I Fidanzati as skeptical about the billing-obsessed star system and its exceptionalist ideology. The star of this movie, even more than the lead performers, and even more than cinema, is the People, or Italy as a vivd and notoriously precarious collective, or this particular but porous moment in narrative time, sociopolitical time, abstract time, immediate time, remembered time. Not just its compact length but its inviting sensorium and its textured affective ambience makes I Fidanzati tempting to rewatch again immediately. No shade at all on the same period's increasing zeal for self-consciously monumental masterpieces, not least from ingenious and strenuously self-branding Italian auteurs; 8½ and The Leopard both opened the same year, and surely we all worship both? Still, I enjoyed the sense, albeit illusory, of "discovering" a more introspective, soft-spoken paragon of cinematic craft, not pre-sold internally or externally as a graven tablet of Film History, but sustaining as deep a dialogue with its era (without grandiosity or dogmatism) as with its characters (without solipsism or sentimentality). Grade:A–
P.S. I watched this movie because Mike Mills has consistently adduced it while promoting all four of his features (Thumbsucker, Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C'mon, C'mon) as a tremendous, ongoing influence on his approaches to editing and script structure. I can't pretend I'd have pegged that connection without his declaiming it, but if you know those movies well, you won't struggle to see the resonances—or, even better, to feel them.
P.P.S. I used this viewing as an excuse to add a Movies of 1963 page to my website. Have I been sleeping on a pretty supreme vintage for cinema, both short- and long-form and across a panorama of styles and cultures? That's already an intimidating Top 10, and I still haven't seen at least two dozen of that year's consensus standouts.
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
