Sunday ChitChat once again hacking reality

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Perhaps because I am preparing to go further. Beyond these photos I took some time ago at the lowlands of the Santa Ana River.

We have beautiful places very close by; it is only a matter of grabbing a map and being in the right vibration to also attract someone who wants to join you in the conquest. There are also other sites already explored and shared on social media, which look super interesting, and we can create our own wish list with them.

Yes, in my case, it must be that way — I feel there are secluded places I should not go to alone.

Are you seeing the same rabbit as I am? What could it be whispering in secret to its companion?

I haven’t had much time to sit down and write. Nor have I been out cycling as I like. But that will be corrected as soon as possible! Since my body is crying out for movement. It is liberating, it is my best way to meditate, to be present… pedalling. The human body is a perfect machine. We must take care of it, of its gears, just as we make sure our bicycles are in good condition. Nourish the body and the soul with food and quality moments. This is something very powerful. If your body or your soul show reluctance, that is not the place. You need to pay attention to those dialogues.

Yesterday, the 27th, was my birthday, and yes, I rode my bike to the house of my friends Mary and Edua, who invited me for lunch and to spend some time with them.

Ok, I’ll let your gaze wander through this place… and I’ll keep writing at the end. Hold on to that thought which is right now in your head, and if you feel like it, share it in the comments section.

This Saturday I stayed at home without doing much. I had pending the film by Vittorio De Sica, Bicycle Thieves, to comment on it here.

Grab yourself a drink, some popcorn, a burger, sweets, energy bars… whatever you fancy, because we’ll be talking about films.
_{Sunday ChitChat – Week 13 Highlights and New Prompts}

_{And here I am once again hacking reality, because I’m writing during the window before the next initiative is launched… hahaha…} 😁

So that’s what I did, and I’m not going to write an expert review of it or anything like that, just a few notes… I enjoyed watching it again. I first saw it many years ago as part of an exercise at college. The subject was film appreciation and, of course, they spoke about Italian Neorealism. I had an excellent professor, a film critic, Joel del Río.

To be honest, I didn’t remember much. Only the scene with the sheets and the theft of the bicycle, Antonio’s desperate face… which at that time made me feel the same way, desperate. Today was no different.

What mastery De Sica shows in making us distrust Antonio Ricci from the scene where he meets Maria, carrying two buckets of water… (The woman keeps carrying the two buckets until finally he realises he must help her… he takes one, why not both?) Maria is the one who holds the household together, with two small children and even him. And then she sells the sheets, half of Italy was selling (or pawning) things in order to survive.

A friend once told me that the film gave him a bad feeling when he first saw it, and I replied then that he shouldn’t watch it, that he should choose to see beautiful things instead. In my mind appeared that little Jiminy Cricket, conscience whispering: hunger has no morals; it has urgency. And in that urgency, anyone can become a thief — for a plate of food or for a shred of dignity.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that I am watching this film today.

It may have been said often enough already, but I agree: one of the greatest achievements of Ladri di biciclette was to show the human condition without make-up. In a world saturated with happy endings and visual anaesthesia, one wonders whether we still have the courage to look at ourselves in that mirror.

Neorealism is often associated with spontaneity, but here De Sica carried out a very precise, almost surgical planning in the emotional sense. For example, I felt it right from the beginning with the camera shots — wide, deep (I mean depth of field). He immerses us in waiting, from the very start when the main character leaves his bicycle unattended for a moment to see where his wife has gone, already placing us in a situation of tension. He is already announcing what is to come… this is how he plays with our emotional strings.

When Antonio pastes the poster of Rita Hayworth on the wall, the film rubs in our faces the brutal distance between Hollywood fantasy and the harshness of real life.

At the beginning of the film, I, as a spectator, started judging, but as the scenes unfolded the suffering took hold of me more and more. Ricci reports the theft of his bicycle at a police station, and there they tell him that if he has time he should look for it himself, since he is the one who knows it, and that it would take a whole platoon to search for it across Rome. How sad — that was his only means of survival. After a year he had finally managed to be hired to paste posters around the city, on the condition that he had his own means of transport: a bicycle. And that bicycle, upon receiving the news that he had been hired, he had pawned in order to feed his family. That is why Maria sells the sheets, to recover it so that he could work. How sad, isn’t it… and so the ending is already foreshadowed, the painful and chaotic scene. There are several such moments, but… to become a thief before the eyes of his little son is truly devastating.

😔

And I ask myself here in my own country, how many youngsters use their bicycles to put a plate of food on the table. To buy medicines for their sick relatives, making deliveries all over the city. Do you know how many bicycle thefts I hear about in a single week? And I always ask myself the same thing: was he beaten or did they use some kind of violence to take it from him, or did he simply let his guard down? Not long ago, in a group they posted the address of a place where a boy doing deliveries on his bike was assaulted. Nothing more — these were the thoughts running through my mind as I watched the film.

It is interesting how De Sica chose the actors for this film. Perhaps you would like to know a little about this — here is the link. As a curiosity, I can tell you that Maria was a journalist who one day went to interview him, and he offered her the role.

Prolonged misery, the stress of not knowing whether your family will eat tomorrow, causes total havoc, wearing down your mental capacity to make logical or rational decisions. He does not fail only because society blatantly turns its back on him, but because of that constant trauma which feeds his incompetence, indecision and passivity. From the very beginning we see an apathetic Antonio Ricci sitting away from the crowd waiting for work; they call him and he is not even there, a friend has to fetch him. Later, leaving the bicycle unattended when he should have clung to it. And so… so many things… Bruno, his son, working at such a young age in a petrol station. Terrible… in the end, I am not here to give spoilers, only to encourage you to watch the film.

I don’t think it would be a waste of time — it is a masterpiece! What a film of contrasts! I believe this film is a visceral call to practise empathy. The triggers pressed here are universal and profoundly human.

What can we expect of Antonio once the credits of this film have rolled? After all the things he goes through in the story, would he begin a new day as an unemployed labourer, struggling with dignity to move forward — or as a chronic criminal?

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