Vittorio De Sica
1948
93 minutes
This is yet another film that sounds more fun than it actually is.
You can imagine this as some sort of stylish French New Wave film following a ring of bicycle thieves, going around Paris stealing bikes during the day and carousing at night. Imagine a pair of con artists, played by Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, who take turns distracting the owners of expensive bicycles with their looks and their wiles and then pedaling off with their ill-gotten goods. After being introduced to these lovable rogues with a series of vignettes and breaking-the-fourth-wall narration directly to the camera about their methodology and motivations, one of them accidentally steals something of great value in a satchel bag attached to one of the bikes. Maybe it's an expensive artwork or secret spy stuff or details on some OAS plot. For the rest of the film they're pedaling around trying to get rich and prevent some catastrophe from taking place uncovered by their ill-gotten gains.
At least that's how you imagined it. Instead you find that this is actually a touching and depressing piece of post-war Italian neo-realism set in Rome with a father struggling to provide for his family. This is not a delightful romp, and if you watched it trying to lighten the mood after watching the similarly depressing Titicut Follies from Section 45 (which you initially thought was about a notorious Cramps concert at a mental hospital which you had previously seen portions of), then you are in for a serious double bummer.
In this film, the dad gets his bicycle stolen right off the bat, and he and his son spend the rest of the movie trying to track it down so that he doesn't lose his crappy job putting up posters for a living. It has a shockingly sad ending for a film in which no one really dies or is seriously injured, and you're officially a monster if you walk away from this one with dry eyes.
Time to choose something different: