Il Posto

The dreams of our childhood never come wholly true.  Unfortunately, for many, they come far less true than for others.

The film Il Posto (1961), which I saw last night as part of an Italian film series, is a wonderful introduction to the horrors of corporate employment -- a caricature of the life of a drone, Italian-style.

The hero, the teenager Domenico,¹ lives in a suburb of Milan -- the son of a lower middle class family, living in an Italy that's not yet prosperous, but that has progressed far beyond the destitution of the immediate post-war years.  Domenico has dropped out of school so that his family can afford to educate his younger brother.  It's time for him to find a job; his dreams of the pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood lead him forward with both hope and trepidation.  He seeks a job as an "administrative clerk."

Domenico, a shy and rather passive youth, dresses in his best coat and tie, and proudly takes the train into the city to interview for a job.  (The background scenes of Italian family and city life in 1961 are themselves worth the price of admission.)  He finds himself in a room full of similar slicked-up applicants for various jobs with the company -- all of whom seem equally bewildered.  They are marched through the city streets, like kids on their way to recess, to another building, where they take an absurdly easy "aptitude test," an "easy" test that many of them nevertheless fail.  The survivors are subjected to a group physical examination, reminscent of American army physicals back in the days of the draft.

The boy ends up assigned temporarily as assistant to the company's messenger, a man whose laziness and cynicism amaze him; then, when one of the older administrative clerks unexpectedly dies, he receives the job he had been aiming for.

We have seen his new fellow employees in action (or, rather, inaction) in scenes before this denouement.  A room full of men, sitting at desks facing their supervisor like boys in a classroom, whose behavior also resembles those same school boys.  They have their sinecures; they receive their paychecks.  No one seems to care that little work is being done.  The deceased employee has left behind in his desk "Chapter 19" of a novel he'd been writing on company time.  The employees stare into space.  They read.  They grumble at each other.  They compete for minor advantages.

Domenico precipitates the biggest disruption the room had seen in ages when he inadvertantly sits down in the empty desk vacated by the deceased novelist.  A middle-aged time-server in the back of the room explodes that he'd been waiting for that desk for decades -- and now some kid was going to get it?  The supervisor soothes everyone's feelings, and Domenico willingly moves to the desk at the back of the room.  The ruffled feathers begin gradually to collapse once more.

Domenico stares off into space.  He adjusts the lamp on his desk, the lamp whose bright beams the complainer had been complaining about -- no doubt for decades.  He wonders what he's supposed to do.

Domanico is only a teenager, and he already has a paying job that he can hold until the day he dies.  He's accomplished his lifetime goal.  There's no where else, no where higher, for him to go.  How does he spend the next fifty or sixty years?

Responses to my one-paragraph Facebook summary of this film suggest that Domenico's plight is common, not one suffered only by Italians of the 1960s.
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¹ Domenico is played by Sandro Panseri, an actor best known for this part, who also played roles in two later Italian movies in the early 1960s.  He plays the shy youth brilliantly, speaking far more eloquently with his eyes and his face than his character's reticence would permit from his voice.  The actor still lives in Milan, according to IMDb, currently managing a supermarket.