The Thieves Who Stole His Bicycle

Having not been impressed by Italian films despite my many attempts at trying to be impressed, I finally decided to give The Bicycle Thief (1948) (or is it in plural, as thieves? I still don’t know!) a try – my final shot at Italian cinema, failing which I would erase Italy off my copy of the world map. At the outset, I was expecting nothing more than a pretentious parade of pseudoartistic babble along the lines of Fellini’s 8-1/2, also considered an Italian classic. But as the minutes went by and the story uncovered layer by layer, I stopped rolling my eyes and began to show a hint of interest and toned down my condescension towards the filmmaker little by little. At the end of the 90 minutes that followed, I was left with an expression that can only be best put in the words of Col. Walter Kurtz (from Apocalypse Now): “My God, the genius of it!”

The genius of it lies in its unnaturally simplistic yet powerful plot lacking any signs or symptoms of pretentiousness that is so dominant in the so-called “classics” of world cinema. I don’t mean any disrespect to the black-and-white era, but with the exception of Orson Welles and to some extent Alfred Hitchcock, I largely avoid most pre-Kubrick films. Granted, there were innumerable contributions from a slew of filmmakers – some, like D. W. Griffith, more than others – over a stretch of several decades, but it’s hard to find much of what is good about cinema in a single film in many films before the 1960s. Even those who made significant contributions to film direction, like Akira Kurasowa, brought out such pathetically painful acting from their actors that it makes it almost impossible to watch the scenes, and I would instead prefer to just read the subtitles and pretend to have seen the film as it were. But the Bicycle Thief, I’m glad to say, was a delicious surprise.

At its heart, the film explores our reaction to desperation – the presence of desperation can be subtly or strongly felt at every step of the movie – and how external material objects such as a bicycle can determine and control the life and livelihood of an entire family. The film follows a father and son’s vain attempt at finding their stolen bicycle which would help them “live again” through his new job – job being a very lucky find in post-Fascism Italy. There is no heavy-handed symbolism or over-readable metaphors at any point (although I suspect some pseudointellectual critics will read too much into it anyway – as they always do. Please watch South Park Season 14 Episode 2 for a clever criticism of reading too much into symbolism; to quote Beckett, "No symbols where none intended"), and for this reason, the film has been rightly hailed as the first great neo-realist film of the century. It is realistic to the extent that the two central characters – the father and the son – were specifically chosen as non-actors. Now, I am of the opinion that if symbolism be used in a story, it be used in such a way and form that it is instantly transmitted to the audience via an emotional channel, not via intellectual dissection of “what could this represent” ideas to reach the meaning. That is the difference between real art and pseudoart, and that is what art is about – an emotional transference of ideas and opinions, not an intellectual social theory or puzzle. The most glaring example of this aspect of the film is the way it is ended: (although it is used to the point that it is hackneyed in movies today, The Bicycle Thief was the first film to use this technique) the main character walks with the crowd and slowly blends into it and becomes unidentifiable in it, and eventually we see nothing but the crowd – meaning that the story you just saw could be a story of any person from that crowd, and therefore, of anyone including you.

The critics had initially observed that this is a story of a typical man in post-WWII Italy. But really, that is just a very narrow way of looking at it, since the characters, the setting, and the emotions that the plot evokes are so identifiable with and realistic that it is almost universally true, and for all ages of time. 8.5/10.

The frustration in their faces: a rational response to the desperate circumstances they are in

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