![]() There are any number of men outside that employment office ready to do the job if Antonio can’t - and racks of bikes at the pawn shop just like Antonio’s. Second, a great many people are in similar straits. Antonio suffers for want of social and moral capital as well as economic capital. There are other kinds of poverty besides purely monetary poverty. In other words, there can be no question of scraping together to replace the bicycle when the disaster foretold by the film’s title befalls Antonio. It is Maria who sees what must be done: She pawns all their bedsheets (some never used) to redeem the bicycle.Ĭonsider all the film establishes in these brief opening scenes.įirst, Antonio and Maria are already at the limits of their resources, forced to choose between one necessity and another: transportation or food basics of shelter (bedding) or employability (the bicycle). The problem: The job requires a bicycle, and Antonio has recently pawned his to buy food. “Do I have rotten luck or what?” he laments to his wife Maria (Lianella Carell). Indeed, he accepts the job fatalistically convinced that he can’t take it. Is he apathetic, or just hopeless? The hungry look on his face when he hears the news tells the tale: Antonio cares deeply, but he’s a man already nearly beaten by life. Tellingly, when his name is called, Antonio isn’t waiting attentively with the other men he is absently idling some distance away, and must be called by the others. ![]() ![]() The story opens at a government employment office where Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) waits with dozens of other men for job openings. Yet there is far more to Bicycle Thieves than its parable-like plot suggests. In that sense, it is more poetic and less quasi-documentarian than other works of neorealist movement it is also, in part for the same reason, among the most accessible and universal neorealist films, as well as the best-known and most influential. Bicycle Thieves thus has the power of a great parable or fable. ![]()
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