< < back
(this review was originally written February 20, 2022)
Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves is a very, very simple movie. In fact, it's so straightforward that I think it is best understood less like traditional cinema and more as a fable, like the ones I was told as a kid. Specifically, it occupies the sub-genre of fable known as "For Want of a Nail". It looks like this: For want of attention, the bike was lost. For want of a bike, the job was lost. For want of a job, the money was lost. For want of a money, the food was lost. For want of a food, the lives will be lost. And all for the want of attention. The moral: better pay attention to your bicycle, there, bucko.
In keeping with its nature as a fable, Bicycle Thieves strictly follows the minimal beats necessary to advance the plot and avoids excess detail. Antonio Ricci is poor. Then, he gets a job, for which he needs a bicycle. Then, he buys one by pawning his bedsheets. Then... I already knew what would happen before going in, but it didn't hurt the viewing experience at all. In fact, de Sica seems to assume the audience can figure out where the plot is going, and includes little winks throughout, as in a scene early on where Antonio's bike is almost, but not quite, stolen.
Because of this laser-focus on fable-plot, the characters never advance much beyond vague sketches. Take, for example, Antonio's wife Maria. She has two personality traits; (1) she is Antonio's wife, and (2) she is superstitious. Her superstition is relevant because it leads into the fortune-teller scene in Act III. Once these two traits are established, Maria never shows up again - not even for the ending! The whole movie is constructed sparsely like this. Even Antonio, the main character, is kind of a generic everyman. This is sensible only if you recognize Bicycle Thieves as a fable, a genre not generally known for expansive worldbuilding.
I have only one criticism of Bicycle Thieves, but it's a big one: feature-length movies don't make good fables. I had a book of stories by Aesop when I was young; the average length per story was ~20 pages, and the average number of sentences per page was three. Without any worldbuilding, there's just not enough meat for a story like this to fill all the running time. De Sica gets around this by repeating himself a lot; probably at least a third of the scenes are, in some way, redundant to other scenes in the movie. I'm particularly thinking of the 'Antonio yells at someone who he thinks is connected to his stolen bike, but he's wrong, and thereby makes a fool of himself' story beat, which plays out like four times. Imagine if, in The Tortoise and the Hare, the Hare didn't just take a nap - he took two naps, went for a little stroll, did a crossword, took another nap, and only THEN did he realize he lost. We get it! The hare's hubris led to his downfall! Can we move on?
The upshot of this is that, as a minimalist story, Bicycle Thieves has what TvTropes would call 'Applicability'. There's a lot of room for interpretation here, and as a result, the film holds up a lot better than you'd expect after 70+ years. One gets the sense, almost, that De Sica wants the viewer to seek out new interpretations for his movie. For example, back in paragraph one when I said what I thought the moral was, I was being facetious. The ACTUAL moral of Bicycle Thieves is about UBI.
Oh, sure, De Sica probably didn't INTEND to write it as a UBI story. In fact, I'm not sure De Sica even knew what UBI was. But think about it: everything about Antonio's situation is a direct consequence of the disconnect between his need for work and the state's relative lack of need for laborers. Suppose that, rather than trying to find the guy who stole his bicycle, Antonio quit his job and signed up for Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend instead. Then all his troubles would be over! Thanks, Mr. Yang!
Let's return to the "For Want of a Nail" description of the plot. For most of the movie, De Sica focuses on the single point, 'attention -> bicycle'. But ANY break in the chain of causality would save Antonio from his fate. It's only because of an incompetent bureaucracy that he needs the bike in the first place; look at it from the 'bicycle -> job' angle, and now it's a fable about the dehumanizating potential of red tape. 'Job -> money' is UBI, of course, but take a 'money -> food' reading and suddenly De Sica is starting to look a bit Communist. Hell, why not go all the way and cut the tie between food and life directly? Maybe Bicycle Thieves is, at its core, really a fable about transhumanism. Let Antonio ascend to a plane of pure energy, abandoning this petty material realm! Can't steal a bike if you don't have a physical form to grab it with.
6.5/10