A Different Meaning

Let me start off by saying that I’m not a film buff, but every once in a while I’m overwhelmed at how stories and now I must add films tend to have a different meaning at different stages of my life. It’s interesting to note that looking at things with the eyes of a twenty-old versus the eyes of a sixty year old is extremely different. As a twenty year old your mind is not as cluttered and the filtering process of thoughts and ideas takes very little time. You generally come up with a conclusion based on your life’s experience in a matter of seconds.

Given the same information as a sixty year old, that filtering process is much more refined and it takes much longer to digest what was presented and the end product is very different. I imagine if all your faculties are still sharp at eighty years of age you will probably have another outlook on the same subject or topic.

I’ve recently watched The Bicycle Thief, an Italian film from 1948 – a film that’s almost as old as me. I know I saw this film about thirty years ago, but I remembered very little of it. It must have been boring to me back then. It is a very simple story of life in Italy after World War II. It brings out the stark reality of what people faced each and every day. When I watched it back then, I didn’t realize that this was the same exact time that I was brought up. I now have a better understanding of how poor we were. I didn’t know it back then because that’s how everybody else lived and I thought that was the norm. Not that I’m rich, but my lifestyle now gives me the contrast where I can see the difference. Those are the layers of filtering that build in your mind and your thought process.

The story is simple and it has four characters only one of which is a professional actor. The bicycle, the conduit for this poor soul to earn a living, is stolen on his first day of work. The man seeks along with his son to find the thief. In their search they learn a lot about themselves. The film nevertheless paints a fairly bleak picture of life and also goes further to suggest some of the reasons behind the depressing existence portrayed.

The film does a good job of making you look at the problems presented through the eyes not only of the main character but at least two if not all four. The struggles, the hopes and dreams and the reality of life are served to us in The Bicycle Thief.