Unlike relying on symbols and aesthetics of the real world to convey a sense of realism in cinema, neorealism and their neorealist filmmakers of Italy during 1940s and 50s, turned their gaze at their impoverished communities of the poverty plagued cities and their war-torn nation to construe the precarity of both the day-to-day life of the masses as well as the eroding of their collective identity.

It was in the middle of this cinematic movement that one of the most important and better-known examples, in the rather short cinematic pantheon of Italian neorealism, Vittoria De Sicca’s 1948 seminal film Bicycle Thieves released to the public. The film follows the poverty-stricken family of Antonio and his son Bruno, in their effort to find Antonio’s stolen bicycle, which is a requirement and a necessity for him to fulfil his duties in his newly employed position as one of the few workers tasked with pasting film posters in and around the walls of the post-war crumbling city of Rome.

The staging, editing, and mis-en-scene of the film further adds to the realism of the situation presented in the film. There are no montages, camera trickery, or any other form of distinctive cinematic “stylishness” present in the film. Unlike his contemporary Hollywood peers’ incessant need for glamourizing, and thereby injecting a sense of artifice in every nook and cranny of their films, De Sicca strengthens the sense of realism not only by shooting almost the entirety of the film in un-glamourised locations of Rome, elsewise romantically portrayed as the ‘cradle of the Western civilisation’, but by also casting his characters with untrained actors breathing similar lives outside the gaze of his camera. Such, in the context of his film, the characters exist as a perfect representation of the millions of others living under the same precarious and broken system.

When there is little money or resources to go around the people, when the jobs are far and few in between and the wages barely enough for survival, no matter how young or old, healthy or sick, everyone is expected to chip in for the family to afford food on the table. Perhaps that is why the apathetic system of a reeling nation on the lower class better reflected on the character of Bruno than it is on anyone else. During the first act of the movie, on the day of the inciting incident, one of the titular thieves thieve their family of their Fides, Bruno, a young boy barely 9 years of age, wakes up early with his parents to ready himself to earn a part of their mead. He meticulously cares and cleans his beloved bicycle, advises his father how he should have handled the rough handling of the pawnshop worker, and quips “I’d have said something!”. The sequence ends with both the father and the son leaving for their day of work out in the world. But just before leaving, unlike his father who failed to notice, Bruno finds his infant sibling lying under the sunlight, peers at baby for a sad moment, and goes back to close the window so as to shield the baby from the sobering harsh light of world – a world Bruno have no choice but to face whether he is prepared or not.

Though their poverty forced Bruno to grow up years more than he should, the child in him remains. The tussle between the carefree life every child should have and the responsible ‘adult’ that he should be for the sake of his family comes into play during the second act of the film when the duo goes to an eatery to momentarily detach themselves from their reality. During several points in the scene, Bruno enjoys, even indulges, in the façade of blissfulness Antonio puts up in front of his child. But seeing the rich family next to their table makes Bruno conscious. Antonio remarking, “to eat like them you’d have to earn a million lira a month”, and later having Bruno account what could be his fathers’ wage brings him back to their reality. 

While one could argue that Antonio first transforms into a ‘thief’ at the end of the film when he tries to run away with someone else’s bicycle, the first act of thieving he commits is the one against his son. After an emotionally and physically exhausting day, Antonio offers Bruno hope for a blissful meal, only to drag him back to their sobering reality two bites into his mozzarella sandwich. While the cyclical effect of poverty on the working-class people is the central focus of the film, forcing parents to look away from the pains, desires, and needs of their children, at the same time children donning the role of their guardians is another theme of the social reality De Sicca portrays in his neorealist magnum opus.