This is a film directed by Ermanno Olmi and although well made, I also found it a bit dull.

Giovanni and Liliana are engaged and live in Northern Italy. Despite their engagement, however, they seem very blasé about their relationship--particularly Giovanni. Will they eventually get married or won't they--it's hard to tell. When his company wants to transfer him to a plant in Southern Italy, he accepts--but also finds the new location very lonely. And, for the first time, he seems to need Liliana. Believe it or not, there really is no more to the film than this! There are LOTS of longing looks, quiet moments and little dialog. It's the sort of film artsy folks will probably love but the average person will find dull. I appreciated the film...but also found it too slow and dull. Perhaps this was deliberate--to make the viewers also feel pained, bored and alienated.

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.

In many ways, Italian film "I Fidanzati"/The Fiances can be considered as a stylish extension of Ermanno Olmi's previous film "Il Posto". Both of his films present the preponderance of man over machine as human beings have the ability to reveal their sentiments, crack a joke, dance and sing. Olmi has shot his film with the astute eyes of a documentary filmmaker who is more interested in capturing the daily lives of his protagonists. A scene which elicits widespread sympathy involves the waiter of an industrial hostel who shares the troubled tale of his son's illness with a new employee. The industrial landscape of Sicily has been shown in all its honesty with some casual yet frank shots of industrial plants with workers who toil throughout days and nights. A sensible viewer does not lose much time to discover that this is a film about a man trying to find his rightful place amidst a fast changing industrial scenario where some old men are believed to have collapsed due to loneliness. The film also echoes its Neorealist concerns about the romantic lives of two young people who had to separate due to circumstances beyond their control. Ermanno Olmi creates a balanced position of young lovers by showing how each of them is dealing with the absence of the other partner. Finally,I Fidanzati is a perfect film for those viewers who would like true to life stories unroll before their eyes.