I fidanzati

Carlo Cabrini gets a chance for a big promotion. The catch is he'll have to move to Sicily for eighteen months. He's worried about his decrepit father, and his fiancee, Anna Canzi is sulky. When he arrives in Sicily, he finds it foreign and oddly noisy and the people strange and greedy and annoying, but as time goes on, he begins to grow accustomed to its rhythms and his strange dreams the lack of a letter from Miss Canzi. Then a letter arrives....

Ermanno Olmi's ultimately very romantic movie is, when you come down to it, standard studio fare. There were hundreds, if not thousands of movies like it made and still being made. Even so, Olmi's script leaves the outcome in doubt through the end and the cinematography by Lamberto Caimi offers us Sicily first as a terrible and alien landscape that grows warm and home-like is a very seductive fashion. It's a well-told tale.