A Film Canon

Bicycle Thieves manages to transform an extremely simple premise - a father and son's attempt to locate a stolen bicycle - into the masterpiece of early neorealism. This is partly due to De Sica's choice of non-professional actors, all of whom exude such an affinity for their roles that it's hard not to believe that the film isn't a straightforward documentary, and its allegory of cyclic poverty a mere fact of life, thereby constituting an analogous conflation of natural history and Marxism to The Earth Trembles. In the same way, De Sica's supreme sensitivity to the Roman cityscape creates a series of extraordinary, evocative tableaux - a mass held for the homeless, German nuns and priests sheltering from the rain, the journey between the protagonists' recently built housing estate and the inner city - whose symbolic magnitude seems almost accidental, and therefore more pregnant; a phenomenon that the camera just happens to have recorded. From this perspective, the textured relationship between father and son, which sets up sentimentality as a limit to be infinitesimally approached, but never quite reached, is ultimately due to their status as manifestations of this cityscape, and, more specifically, to the introduction of the bicycle as the third term in their love, as evinced in its elevation to the status of a protagonist, instantly recognisable - even as a fragment - from the thousands of others that crowd the city, which reach a surreal, hallucinatory pitch in the penultimate sequence.