[cine) La Circostanza - 1974 - Ermanno Olmi (byjAcHi)_L001.avi 
Plot
This family drama is a highly personal vision by Italian writer/director/cameraman Ermanno Olmi. It details a summer in the life of the family of a prosperous businessman and his wife. However, there are ominous signs in his life: his company may let him go, his wife finds the family uninvolving, and his son and daughter are now old enough to be independent and somewhat self-centered. His wife finds solace in caring for a young accident victim, his son finds solace in his inventions and in his wife and new child, and the young daughter (who dislikes her mother) in her newfound sense of romance. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
IMDb link:La circostanza/The Circumstance (1973; August 10 at noon) pushes to an extreme the fragmentation of I fidanzati and Un certo giorno. The film examines several members of a well-to-do family during a summer of crisis for each: teenage Silvia is tempted to lose her virginity; her brother is in rebellion against his parents; their older brother’s wife is about to give birth; the head of the family takes part in a business simulation that, though presented as an educational game, reminds him and his fellow office workers that their futures are uncertain; and his wife, after arriving at the scene of an accident in which a teenage boy has been badly burned, finds a new, private purpose in life as she makes repeated visits to the boy’s hospital room. The film has extraordinary fluidity: as Olmi’s short flashbacks overlap, it becomes difficult to tell whose subjectivity, if anyone’s, is organizing the narrative. Toward the end, it becomes almost too explicit in its willful inconclusiveness and its mysticism, but it’s exciting to watch.
In La circostanza especially, but also in his other films, Olmi’s jagged editing patterns create the sense that the characters are living not in the present moment but in a whirl of pasts, futures, and fantasies. His characters, mirroring us, hope and expect to emerge intact at the other end of this everyday chaos. But in I fidanzati, who knows what will happen after Giovanni’s one and a half years in Sicily? And will the father in La circostanza come to work tomorrow to find his desk cleared? ~ CHRIS FUJIWARA
http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0069885/
