The Sound of Trumpets

Initiation, the entrance of a young man into the conclave of adult responsibility and pleasure, has its own peculiar, ritualistic aura in all historical periods, in religions, in social and geographic cultures. In a time of pomp and splendor, the sound of trumpets may well have accompanied this transition; a joust, a quest, a courtship, a battle--these were great romantic events which marked the metamorphosis. In modern times, the story of initiation has taken a gloomy turn--it has been painted as an end to innocence, an exposure to squalor or violence, a rude "realistic" shock from which the youth may never recover. Economic, moral, and interpersonal burdens conspire to shatter his early sensitivity. Ermanno Olmi has written and directed a film of a contemporary initiation which spurns both these alternatives.

His youth, an Italian boy entering a white-collar job, is no fragile Dedalus embarking upon a tragic bildungsroman; neither is he a dashing hero in a setting devoid of heroism. Domenico's passage into adulthood takes place without ceremony or bravado. He passes quietly, but not painlessly, self-consciously, but never cutely, into a world of hopeless vacuity. Throughout the movie Olmi shows him what he may become--a dulled commuter from lower middle-class suburbs, a paunchy clerk gazing through shop windows, an embittered office-worker yearning for a piddling promotion.

Domenico observes his new world with passive half-comprehension. Olmi does not tell us that he might have been more; he has been lucky--we are constantly reminded--lucky to have passed his exams, lucky to have been hired, lucky to have been taken into the corporate "family." The job, with its occasional minor advances, shall be his all. We are permitted brief glances into the emptiness of the outside lives of his co-workers. Caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, they exist without misery, without real joy, on a treadmill of uncompromising mediocrity. Yet this restrained portrait of an Italian class is more saddening even than the depravity of La Dolce Vita.

At the Company New Year's Eve party, a soggy little orgy of pretend-gaiety, Domenico seems at first gawky and estranged. But he is drawn in, fearful, perplexed, hungry for human contact; until at last he bounces with the rest in a giggly conga-line.

The next day, when an old clerk dies, Domenico is promoted and his destiny is sealed. As his father exclaims, too joyfully, "He has a job for the rest of his life." He will grow old with the company.

But the beauty of Olmi's firm lies in his suggestion that even this gray existence contains moments which justify the trumpets of his title--moments that make them more than the toy horn Domenico awkardly tweetles at the party, more than the imaginary bugles his mother must blow to wake him for work. In part they celebrate the quiet heroism required to endure the drabness of day to day experience. More important, they herald those unexpected appearances which break the stultifying regularity in which Domenico finds himself trapped; the possibility of love and the hope that love promises.

Domenico's love is Antonietta, a girl whom he first sees at the company exams, and from whom he is separated by the precious jobs which might have brought them together. The company's vast impersonality keeps them apart, but is at least partially transcended by their glances, by their slight contact, and by the chance that they may some day truly discover one another. It is this possibility for change, for mutuality, that life extends to Domenico, which lifts his colorless routine into the realm of emprise. It is this possibility which lends animation, humor, and warmth to the Sound of Trumpets.

Olmi has directed his first feature film with a poetic, slowly-paced delicacy that reminds one of Truffaut; he handles the fumbling love between Domenico and Antonietta with a subdued richness of feeling that characterized the most subtle moments of Chayefsky's Marty. He focuses his camera on countless specks of life which we, as well as his own characters, have hurried past. And a potent, bottled-up vitality swells from under even the most mundane street scene or conversation. Declining the easy gimmicks of wierd camera angles or background music, yet nevertheless infusing his simple story with extraordinary emotional depth, Olmi establishes himself at once as a European author-director of the first rank.