The most iconic image to come out of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is that of a disgruntled man sat on the pavement with a young boy beside him. The man’s arms and jaw are flexed with tension and unwound aggression, while the boy has the innocent air of a Victorian street-child, staring at him with an expression in-between imploring and beseeching. This image of father and son sat in static conundrum gestures towards the uncertainty, anxiety and latent social violence of post-war Rome that De Sica manages to paint using swathes of both realism and sentimentality. The finished work is a film that Sight & Sound declared the sixth greatest film of all time, that the BFI ranked as one of the top ten films you should see by the age of 14, and that has found itself in parodies from Maurizio Nichetti’s The Icicle Thief to Aziz Ansari’s playful Master of None.
The film turns 50 this week, and the world is looking very, very different. Rome is no longer defined by the post-war ruin it felt in 1948, a time of scarcity pocketed in-between wartime and the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s. The favouritism among critics and audiences towards Bicycle Thieves does not lie in an attempt to map this extreme economic hardship upon current affairs, however, but in its complex handling of ironies and hypocrisies. We see the man, Ricci, pawn away bedsheets just to pay for a bicycle that will ensure him a much-coveted job. Inside the pawnbrokers are hundreds of bedsheets, stuffed and rolled up, piling higher and higher towards the ceiling in an almost grotesque display of redundancy. Pawnbrokering is a system of exchange – but who is buying these sheets? The people that actually need them are pawning them away, and so this intimate, domestic item of the bedroom is left to pile up, useless, in a warehouse. In letting the camera linger on this ceaseless proliferation of sold bedsheets, De Sica exposes a broken system of exchange in which the supply-demand dynamic of capitalist economy has been ruptured, and needs inevitably go unsatisfied.
And at the centre of this film – but at the margins of this fractured system – stands Ricci, an everyman figure who tries to live honestly but ends up, as happens in tragedy, the perpetuator of corruption itself. As the family pawns their lives away bit by bit, we see more and more of Ricci’s dignity torn from him in thick, unforgiving strips. In the finale he stands as a pariah, as a bicycle thief himself; De Sica compels the audience to bear witness to a man plundered of dignity by circumstance, rendered speechless and naked by his shame and fallen victim to the mob. Capitalism is supposed to empower the individual, yet Ricci is either alienated from the crowds because of his desperation, or gets lost in the anonymous mass of people that flow uniformly through the streets of Rome. He is either pariah or a blunt cog in the machine. He cannot win. He is, as he claims near the beginning of the film, “cursed since I was born.”
But this curse isn’t mystic – it wasn’t thrown upon Ricci in karmic reparation for previous sins, nor is it a manifestation of original sin. Ricci’s curse is merely the brutal set of socio-economic conditions he finds himself in. Though the characters reach for the cosmic to explain their situation through visits to the local soothsayer, De Sica grounds the pathos and tragedy in the real, in the socio-economic complex that relentlessly works against and grinds down the working man. The film depicts a Kafkaesque war of attrition. Ricci is punished, for potentially a lifetime, for a moment of naïve carelessness; he is compelled to chase after people who may or may not know something, if anything, about the stolen bicycle, who disappear and then reappear, who are persistent in their lies and who round up a mob to lie on their behalf. The impotency of the authorities, the visual homogeneity of the streets and bikes, and the persistent grimace of hopelessness that stares down Ricci and his son all add up to a vision that is at once realist and nightmarish.
It is surprising, then, in light of all this bleak corruption and injustice, that audiences have clung onto the film as a darling of their DVD collections. But the overwhelming sentiment of the film is not rage at a harmful system – De Sica could easily let anger boil over and dominate, but his artistic vision is too taut and alert for that – but merely great pathos for the man who is being harmed by it. Yes, the film allows itself to be swollen at times by the saccharine temptations of the sentimental, but what remains is real audience sympathy rather than distraction by anger or mawkishness. De Sica has total control over his film. There is not a moment that does not feel intended, sculpted, kneaded into shape with fine-tuned clarity. He uses this vision, above all, to create what Roger Ebert famously termed an ‘empathy machine’.
Such poverty takes on different forms in modern-day Rome and such oppressions naturally find new, ugly disguises. To bring the film’s depiction of specific economic vulnerability in collation with any current political referent seems pointless, since the setting is extremely particular to its historical context and yet the characters are broad enough to serve as allegories for any context. It is therefore a reaching for empathy for the ordinary man, twisted and contorted by any dire circumstance, submerged within power structures far, far beyond his comprehension, that ensures Bicycle Thieves stands the test of time.
