It takes a while to realize how good this movie is. The story is slender, and if you've something else on your mind it won't hold your interest. The photography is skillful but never stunning. The leads hardly seem to be acting at all. In short, the film is so underplayed that it's easy to miss what it's doing, and to classify it as sensitive, restrained, and dull.

You have to think about the movie after it's over, to replay the scenes in your mind, and try to remember why it was that you never actually laughed at the comic touches, why the pathos was never depressing. Then you may begin to think, as I do, that The Fiances is the finest movie you have ever seen.

It's matter of taste, of course, but at a very basic level. More than anything else, Ermanno Olmi's direction reminds me of the poetry of John Dryden. I happen to like Dryden. Many do not. Throughout the movie Olmi maintains a perfect balance between the melancholy and the ridiculous. And--what is the crucial point--he makes of his small short story something greater than itself.

Not that this tale of a betrothed couple too poor to marry, and now separated because the man is transferred to a plant in Sicily, comes to signify anything. There is no sense of allegory about it. Not than any grand or ennobling passions are aroused or displayed. Giovanni and Liliana simply grow gradually, through their letters and their loneliness, to know and need each other as they had not before. No, their romance assumes the magnitude it does because of the elegance with which it is depicted.

It's hard to imagine how Olmi could have simplified his exposition. There cannot be more than a hundred lines in the film's hour and a quarter. A few shots of Carlo Cabrini's and Ann Canzi's faces define their relations. Short flash-backs played off against Giovanni's activities in Sicily tell the rest.

In the background of Giovanni's Sicilian wanderings are the gigantic industrial complex in which he works and the windmills and huts of the peasants. Olmi makes a point of the contrast, but he makes it gently. The two contests through which Giovanni wanders, yet in which he has no roots accentuate his loneliness, and contribute to the pervasive sadness which is part of the sense of life that Olmi communicates.