The day-to-day struggles of the urban working class are moved from Rome to
London in update of neorealist classic
A modern update on Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, Matt Chambers’ feature debut pays the same attention and care to the day-to-day struggles of the urban working class. The refusal to either romanticise or overly dramatise it makes for especially poignant results and the clear-eyed, unsentimental approach renders the characters’ turmoil even more tragic.
The film draws viewers in with a kind of urban poetry. The camera closely follows a pizza delivery man on his scooter as he zips through traffic, his figure wrapped in the hues of city lights. The halogen flares, however, quickly turn unforgiving, just like the inhospitable environment engulfing this precarious line of work. Initially seen only as a helmet-covered-face in the crowd, the figure emerges as the deliberately unnamed protagonist, credited only as the Rider (played by God’s Own Country’s Alec Secăreanu).