Il Posto

Domenico Cantoni will be a guy you meet at the Large Corporation.  He's been there for many years, a fixture.  Comfortable, but likely dead inside.  He's trudged day in day out, maybe along the way thought about doing something else, but any real action never went beyond a daydream, maybe while nursing an espresso in town.  Once upon a time, he sweated out a series of examinations to get his spot in the L.C.  He was a fresh faced teenager, maybe fairly bright but had to forgo higher education to support his family.  He headed to the Big City.

1961's IL POSTO follows Domenico (Sandro Panseri) in the early days, those filled with yearning and anticipation.  Is he ambitious? He and his parents seem to agree that getting this job - whatever it may be - is his ticket "for life." And why does his brother get to go on to college?

Domenico finds a room filled with applicants. One of them is Antoinetta (Loredana Detto), an attractive girl about his age, likely in the same familial predicament.  He's almost immediately smitten with her on the day of exams, when they get to hold hands and race back to the office because they're late.  That afternoon, they have the sort of "first date" that can drive a young man's imagination to extremes.   Both eventually get hired, but in different departments.  She's in the main building as a typist, and has the second shift lunch.  Domenico is whisked to another building and told that the intended job is unavailable at the moment, so he will serve as a messenger for now.  He has the first lunch shift.  Will he see Antoinetta again? Or is she just another passing ship in this thing called life?

Co-writer/director Ermanno Olmi has created a near masterpiece in the Italian neo-realism genre.  A small, somewhat low key film, yet dealing with the enormities of existence, which itself may  prove to become distressingly minor.  In IL POSTO, we are watching the genesis of yet another blank life, one of the millions who willfully takes his place in the faceless masses, toiling about clerical tasks he may not even comprehend.  Even as one employee encourages him to "use his head", another offers the far more useful advice of "be a good boy." 

Olmi's film is a carefully observed study of the resignation to adulthood and all its compromises and disappointments, which start early.  Its dissection of the utter soullessness of corporate life, from the drone of work to the painful company sponsored social events (the New Year's Eve party sequence is a perfect study of awkwardness, social faux pas, and general social dynamics), is spot on.  Most of the art I appreciate holds up a mirror and I saw much of my younger self in Domenico.  We also get sketches of many of the  other employees, and Carla Colombo's editing does shine in those moments.  The film is somber, but there are some laugh out loud moments.  The satire has bite, and made me wonder if Terry Gilliam got some ideas for Monty Python sketches and BRAZIL.

IL POSTO deserves to be more widely known and praised.   It is the very definition of an unsung gem.