Ermanno Olmi | Il Posto (The Job) / 1961

locked away for life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ettore Lombardo and Ermanno Olmi (screenplay), Ermanno Olmi (director) Il Posto (The Job) / 1961

 

The story of Il Posto, Ermanno Olmi’s film of 1961, begins in Meda, the hero Domenico’s hometown, he attempting to sleep for a few moments longer as his father leaves the house and his younger brother is hurried off to school. Although only a middle school student, at 19 Domenico’s education is over; he has been ordered to apply for a job with a large company in Milan, and today is his interview and tests for the position.

      His hometown is filled with gnarled and cut-away trees, and we already perceive that the young innocent (the engaging Sandro Panseri), peach-fuzz still upon his face, is surely in for some deep disappointments. But the family is desperate for more money, and if he can score this job, it’s suggested, he will have found a position for life: a true kind of imprisonment that Olmi gradually reveals to us.

      Dozens of applicants share the same room, some appearing far more knowledgeable, and still others seeming to have secret connections. The mathematics question which they are asked to solve is one I surely would not have been able to answer. But both Domenico and a beautiful young girl, also applying for a job, Antonietta Masetti (Loredana Detto) easily solve it, going on a window-shopping spree through the streets of Milan to fill the hours between their test and their psychological and medical examinations, which further suggest the jobs they are seeking are closer to military inscription than fulfilling employment.

 

     The city they explore is a postwar world being entirely rebuilt in what was described as Italy’s “economic miracle.” The mass construction may be a sign of better times to come, but in Olmi’s film it also portrays a world, especially for these young outsiders, of complete chaos. Eventually, in rushing back to the plant, they join hands, a bit like two school children seeking consolation in one another. It will be their last significant encounter, and will leave Domenico, in particular, with a sense of utter emptiness.

      Both are hired, she as a typist in a building separate from his, and he, at first, as a kind of meaningless “messenger”—a vague position that consists of mostly waiting around between trips for sandwiches for the bosses and, on occasion, delivering an envelope somewhere else in town. It is certainly not very challenging, and, in its utter lack of significance, the very worst thing a bright young teenager might be locked into.

     Briefly, on one such delivery, he re-encounters Antonietta, who invites him to a company party. He attends, encountering a world of drunken men and women on a linoleum-covered floor with plastic covered tables. His beautiful Antonietta never shows up, obviously involved with the man he has previously observed offering her an umbrella. It can be no accident that the director portrays his hero in a pork-pie hat, reminding one of the beautiful foolishness of Buster Keaton.

      Such is the institution into which Domenico has now been sold, that after the death of an elderly cleric (possibly from suicide), our young hero inherits his desk, after it is moved to the very back of the dimly lit room. The film ends with the young man looking quite bleakly forward, while his fellow workers grumble about such a young man being given such a “prestigious” job.

     While this film is apiece with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment of a year earlier, Wilder’s young man, certainly equally abused and facing perhaps even a bleaker vision of business slavery, Wilder’s hero, Baxter, at least has the possibility of gradually moving up in the chain of bloodsucking executives and does, eventually, move on to get the girl. One might also compare poor Domenico’s future with that of J. Pierpont Finch’s quick rise from total outsider—literarily, having been a window-washer before walking into the brutal business world into which he willingly enters— quickly rising to become the company head in the musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying of the same year as Il Posto. Perhaps it is simply that the Italians had just been a defeated country, or maybe it had something simply to do with the American optimism, but the difference is so apparent that the many similarities become almost meaningless. If Olmi’s movie might also be described as a comedy, it still makes you want to cry.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).