Clear-eyed but compassionate, Il Posto is the other film by Ermanno Olmi, the one that isn’t The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Both are neo-realist to an extent and are concerned, obsessed, with the stuff of everyday life. Here, though, the focus is on the city, whereas Clogs was resolutely a tale of rural peasant life.
It translates as The Job, Il Posto, and follows a young lad from the fringes of Milan, away from his traditional family and into the realm of the modern company. First he takes an aptitude test, where he’s inculcated into the world of time and motion, aptitude, the peg being created to fit the slot, rather than vice versa. And then, once he’s got the job, into company life itself. He meets a girl, he likes her, she likes him and gradually we begin to see that this will be his life from now on – everything mediated through the organisation.
Olmi presents it all as just so, almost as if there is no real authorial voice, except of course there is. His focus is on the machinery of office life and how it dragoons people into playing the way the company wants – the filing, the corridors, the hierarchies, all of it not unlike the way children are treated at school.
For a wild, bracketed-off moment Olmi gives us detail on the outside lives of the people we meet: one is writing a novel back at the lodging house where he lives, another sings operatic arias, a third is saving hard to pay off a debt to a neighbour. Real people, real lives. Suddenly the camera cuts back to the same people at the office, their faces blank.
But for the most part it’s Domenico (Sandro Panseri), first encountered asleep in the kitchen of the tiny family home, because that’s the only space for him. From the way his parents fuss over him, this job, or potential job, is clearly going to be the defining fact of his existence. A job for life, in a solid company, where he can work his way up from the bottom and make something of himself. And Antonietta (Loredana Detto), the pretty young woman Domenico notices on the first day, doing the same aptitude tests he’s doing, one of very few females. After they get to know each other – ever so tentatively on Domenico’s part – she tells him that she’ll do the job until she gets married and then that’ll be that. Because that’s the way it goes with women and working in Italy, even in go-getting, swiftly modernising 1961.
Ironically, that’s exactly what happened to Detto too. She married her director, Olmi, after the film came out and never acted again. This is her only screen role. Whether art is imitating life or vice versa, it also turns out that Olmi’s first job was at a big company in Milan where he, like Domenico, worked as a messenger. It’s how he got his break into film-making, having eventually persuaded the company that what it needed was a documentary division.
This was his second film, the first having been a documentary for Edison-Volta. It has the hallmarks of his later work – it’s simple, humane, has an eye for detail and understands that drama is about human frailty and desire, both abundantly on display here.
Il Posto didn’t do well on its initial release, though smart critics saw it for what it was – a gem that’s simultaneously light as air and remarkably profound. It’s now in the Criterion Collection, having been restored in 2018, and it’s a bit of a classic.
Il Posto – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
