The Fiances

The Fiancés (I fidanzati) is a 1963 Italian drama film written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. It tells the story of a young Milanese worker who moves to Sicily for a job, leaving behind his long-time fiancée. The film was shown in competition at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot
Giovanni works as a welder in a Milanese factory. His superiors offer him a job in their dependance in Sicily with the prospect of a promotion. Giovanni accepts the offer, to the resentment of his long-time fiancée Liliana. While he tries to get accustomed to his new surroundings, he remembers both moments of estrangement from and mutual happiness with her. He starts exchanging increasingly candid and emotional letters with Liliana, who states that maybe their physical distance has re-awakened the love in their habitual relationship.

Cast

 * Carlo Cabrini as Giovanni
 * Anna Canzi as Liliana

Release
The Fiancés was screened in May 1963 at the Cannes Film Festival and in September the same year at the first New York Film Festival.

Reception
In his May 1963 review for Il Giorno, Piero Bianchi titled The Fiancés "a subtle elegy, a work in a minor but accurate and profound tone", also commending Olmi's choice of the main actors.

Upon the film's regular cinema opening in New York in January 1964, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times certified Olmi "a remarkable ability to make images speak" and The Fiancés a "profound agitation of mood", but also pointed out a lack of "large-scale social comment and implications of irony" which he had found in the director's earlier The Sound of Trumpets.

Legacy
The Fiancés was screened as part of retrospectives at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2002, at the Harvard Film Archive in 2015, and repeatedly at the Cinémathèque française.

Awards

 * 1963 OCIC Award at the Cannes Film Festival