The Bicycle Thieves

I've chosen this film to recommend due to it straying from the norm in storytelling. The film is can be seen as a coming of age film. Neorealism was considered the golden age of Italian cinema, and for good reason; Italian Neorealism is a film movement that was a game changer in film. Instead of the everyday happy movie, these films challenged the viewers thinking. Not every film was happy, and more importantly, was so real it could be mistaken as canon if they weren't filmed so elegantly. Everything from the sets to the actors were as natural as possible, the actors being nonprofessional actors in most cases, and the sets being on location. A Neorealism film I’ve watched was Ladri di biciclette, known as The Bicycle Thief. One thing that I found out from the film’s title, the translation isn’t literal, the actual title is plural, which is a spoiler for the film. I think at it’s core, the movie is simple, surprisingly simple for today's films, but the way it was executed was unlike most films I’ve seen. I think the underlying story of the film covered the son’s journey of coming of age. If one sees the father as the main character, it’s a simple film, but if the son is the star, it becomes deep as how the whole world is sheltered from him, from being told to go away when crimes are made, to being hit for doing nothing. The ending has the son in tears, because that’s when the father’s shield is completely shattered, and the son sees him for what he is, and gets a taste of the real world. The acting of the film was phenomenal, I wasn’t watching a film, I was watching some guy with a camera follow these series of events showing me what happened. My personal reaction to the film was well received, if not above the norm, until the ending. The ending was sad, and felt very unsatisfying at first; it felt like a cut, instead of an ending, but, it made me think about the film. After thinking about it, it makes sense, and makes it more emotional of a piece.