Films are essentially about what it creates in you when you watch. But still context matters, more, older the film is. For the films which don't belong to our times, the one about which we read so many times, which we want to see because everyone you awe, awed about it. If we don't know the context, we may miss the beat. We may fail to understand why it was so pulsating then(though not now). The bicycle thieves also needs one such context. If we don't remember (to be exact force ourselves to remember), once cycle itself a luxury, we can ask what the heck, its a cycle.
The movie is more like a short story. It's during great depression times in Italy. The hero gets a job, when everyone struggles to get it. His job is to post flyers. He needs cycle for it. He talks to his wife about his rotten luck of having job and not to go. His wife takes the bed spreads which came as a present for her marriage,(which will explain why she is soar when she takes it to pawn shop) to pawn shop. With the pledged money he retrieves the cycle he pledged long time back. The whole country is running through pawn shops. It is one of the beautifully shot scene in the film. He goes to next counter in the same shop to redeem his cycle. At that time a person carries the bed spreads to store it. He enters a room which is filled with nothing but pledged bedspreads, as if the whole countries bed spreads just lie there.
While in work bunch of guys steal his cycle. The remaining movie is his search for it. During the process he even goes and meet an evangelist , whom he ridicules when his wife go to pay her for prediction that her husband will get job. He becomes a believer, he walk through all roads with his son for cycle. At last when he realizes he can't get the cycle, he decides to steal one. He steals and get caught. People beat him , and all this happens before his son. He walks back with his son. No longer its just a cycle that he lost.
The movie is more like a short story. It's during great depression times in Italy. The hero gets a job, when everyone struggles to get it. His job is to post flyers. He needs cycle for it. He talks to his wife about his rotten luck of having job and not to go. His wife takes the bed spreads which came as a present for her marriage,(which will explain why she is soar when she takes it to pawn shop) to pawn shop. With the pledged money he retrieves the cycle he pledged long time back. The whole country is running through pawn shops. It is one of the beautifully shot scene in the film. He goes to next counter in the same shop to redeem his cycle. At that time a person carries the bed spreads to store it. He enters a room which is filled with nothing but pledged bedspreads, as if the whole countries bed spreads just lie there.
While in work bunch of guys steal his cycle. The remaining movie is his search for it. During the process he even goes and meet an evangelist , whom he ridicules when his wife go to pay her for prediction that her husband will get job. He becomes a believer, he walk through all roads with his son for cycle. At last when he realizes he can't get the cycle, he decides to steal one. He steals and get caught. People beat him , and all this happens before his son. He walks back with his son. No longer its just a cycle that he lost.
The film still has relevance: you can replace a cycle with something. What makes a person to commit his first crime? The little push that starts the free fall of human character. Human character- that’s the word we use to define a man .Man who is actually what he is made of ,all those virtues he wrapped himself which might be of no value, they can't protect him if the things turns out to be too vicious to not break up. As the movie closes he walks back towards home, wiping his face with kerchief and his son holds his hand and his face is filled with tear, it can break anytime.
Its a neorealist film, the earliest of films that used real people and not actors in movie. But not those 'first of time' that makes this movie stand against winds of time. Its relevance, the concept it speaks about and the way it speaks. The way it follows a man's search for his cycle, his only source of hope to a normal life in a dying country. How far he goes to get it back, how much he puts in stake to get it, how much he will take before he gets broke. A movie more than just worth to watch for.....
Note: I thought of the interesting movies I watched last 2 weeks in a single post but will post others later
