It goes without saying that a critic’s personal biases can have a major effect on how they rate a film. So, it’s probably best to be honest about those biases up front, rather than pretending that you’re reviewing films from a purely objective perspective. Personally, the bias I find the most difficult to get past is an embarrassingly simple one: setting. No matter when a movie is set throughout history, I find it’s far easier to lose myself in a story set in a city, rather than the great rural outdoors. No matter whether it’s in the blazing heat of the dusty Old West or on the icy crags of a European mountaintop, I always have to work a little harder to care about stories set outside The City, where my simple urbanite mind longs to be. At least, that’s what was on my simple mind while watching films by Italian neorealist Ermanno Olmi, whose two most famous titles are rooted in the Italian countryside. Olmi’s 1977 Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Wooden Clogs profiles the daily lives and toils of sharecroppers in rural Italy at the turn of the 20th century, forever held down by predatory landlords. It’s a remarkably thoughtful, righteously political work, but I’d be lying if I said spending so much time in the mud & muck of daily farm life didn’t test the endurance of my half-open eyelids. In his 1961 breakout film Il Posto, however, a young man who lives in the Italian countryside actively seeks employment in nearby Milan, hoping to break away from his parents’ small-town control over his daily life by exploring some newfound urbanite freedom. Now, that’s a story I can easily relate to, especially by the time all of his hopeful, youthful momentum crashes into the brick wall of a bureaucratic desk job, where all youth & hope goes to die.
The remarkable thing about urban living is that—unlike farm work—it never really changes all that much. Il Posto is set a half-century and an entire continent away from where I’m living & working today, and I recognized so much of my daily joys & indignities reflected back at me from the screen. Our scrawny desk-jockey hero Domenico (Sandro Panseri) timidly learns his way around a public transit system, a busy coffee counter, an awkward office party, and an endless labyrinth of path-blocking street construction in his early days as a shy, soft-spoken urbanite in the exact ways that I remember them in New Orleans. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: He goes looking for a job, and then he finds a job; heaven knows, you know the rest. In Il Posto‘s most surprising sequence, we briefly leave Domenico’s POV to catch a glimpse of the quiet home lives, petty workplace grievances, and go-nowhere artistic projects of his older, more established coworkers, who’ve long ago settled into the exact daily routine that’s soon to take over his entire life. From there, the film mostly amounts to a catalog of small character quirks & warmly human interactions found in a cold bureaucratic environment, determined to discourage such comradery through staggered lunch breaks and other interdepartmental barriers. Our little country boy’s big city dreams are adorable at first, as he smirks his ways through all the little indignities of modern urban living with the charming boyishness of an Italian Timothée Chalamet. When an older coworker who’s deluded himself into thinking he can live a full life by sneaking in some writing sessions on the clock between work assignments suddenly dies, however, it’s clear the paper-pushing desks Domenico is working towards are just one-man prison cells, each carrying a life sentence. At least, that’s what’s resonating with this humble office worker who’s currently sneaking in a writing session on the clock between work assignments.
Structurally, Il Posto follows the basic plot beats of an eternally popular urbanite genre: the romcom. Our adorably hopeful office worker quickly falls in love with the very first cute girl he meets in the city (Loredana Detto), then spends the rest of the picture trying to capitalize on that romantic spark while ignoring the thousands of other potential matches surrounding him in Milan. Their will-they-won’t-they relationship is undeniably cute, but it’s also undeniably naive, considering how many obstacles daily labor puts between their potential to socialize and how many other people are hanging around as unengaged romantic competition. Eventually, the film’s labor concerns overwhelm its romantic ones, crushing Domenico’s spirit at the very last minute with a kind of heartbreak he was too infatuated to see coming. So, what we effectively have here is a romcom setup to a bleak labor-politics punchline, ultimately making Il Posto just as much of a neorealist political screed as the rural, landlord-bashing Tree of Wooden Clogs. If I could write about film objectively, I might be lauding Wooden Clogs as the more technically impressive work over this scrappy tale of youthful disillusionment, or I might cite this duo as ideological equals in their shared themes of labor exploitation. Since I write subjectively, however, I have to say that the film that most drove home just how long I’ve been hopelessly crushed under the expectations of daily, dehumanizing labor is the one where the main character does the same kind of meaningless work that I do, arrives to his desk via the same city-owned vehicles that I do, and approaches his personal relationships with the same kind of dorky earnestness that I do — ignoring the vast social potential of modern urban living in favor of more immediate loyalty & intimacy. Such is the life of a city boy with a desk job.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 