Il Posto
Director: Ermanno Olmi
Year Released: 1961
Rating: 3.0
Olmi casts several amateur actors and actresses to inhabit this film about growing up and joining the work world - the young man he hired to play him (it's semi-autobiographical) looks hauntingly (but also very appropriately) like a young Franz Kafka. Loses a bit of its momentum and focus after an hour when the main character's love interest wanders out of the picture, but it's less a film than a documentary, and an exceptional one at that. Shows the work world (not to mention the world of 'romance') as the sad, monotonous place it sometimes can be, and the movie's meditation on spending your entire life at a single company and not being appreciated is just as appropriate today as it was forty years ago.
