Neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves said so much about our human condition and the struggle to rise above one’s dire circumstances that its main concept of a man going through hardship in post-World War II Italy can be effectively transposed to contexts pertaining to any number of our current international humanitarian crises, illuminating ordinary people’s states of uncertainty and turmoil. Director Milad Tangshir clearly thinks so too, as his feature debut Anywhere Anytime is a re-working of De Sica’s classic that here centers on the plight of one undocumented migrant from Senegal who tries to make ends meet in present-day Italy.
Ethiopian saxophonist Tèsfa-Maryam Kidané’s soulful, jazzy track “Heywèté” provides an opening to the film, which will also feature other popular Middle Eastern and African music, framing the complicated immigratory experience of our characters while also linking them to their cultural roots as they go about their business in the foreign land. The opening sequence presents people preparing their stalls in a market in the still-dark city of Turin. The camera then cuts to the bloodshot eyes of our visibly exhausted main character — undocumented migrant worker Issa (Ibrahima Sambou) — before returning to the general scene to show the police making rounds throughout the market. This is the time for Issa to run and hide in a nearby truck, because, without his documents, he is working in the country illegally and may face much trouble. Not long after, Issa is fired as his employer fears further encounters with the police.
From this point on, the bones of Bicycle Thieves stick out everywhere within Tangshir’s narratively minimalistic, but still quite ambitious, debut. Issa lands a job as a delivery man, but he needs a bicycle to do the job. His caring, streetwise friend Mario (Moussa Dicko Diango) gives him his own phone and some money to buy one, and it all goes well, until Issa’s newly-bought bike is stolen, the subsequent search for which will force Issa to make some difficult choices. In the spirit of its inspiration, Tangshir’s film also displays documentary-style humanism, pinning an ordinary, hard-working young man against the many socio-economic obstacles of his immediate environment. There are a number of long and medium shots of Issa sitting down, looking contemplative and isolated from his environment, or moving briskly through throngs of busy, seemingly uncaring, people. While there is hardly any romanticism in Bicycle Thieves, Tangshir tries to introduce a bit when portraying Issa’s relationship with his female friend Awa (Success Edemakhiota). After she shares her own experience of homelessness with Issa, the duo bond over their hardship as the perceived pitiful of their existence transforms in our eyes into instances of warmth and compassion. And, in one scene where Issa and Awa are enjoying their bike ride together, the hard-earned, €50 two-wheeler even becomes a precious emblem of their mutual hope for a better future.
Still, the director’s approach is more observational than immersive, and does not seem to capitalize fully on all the story’s dramatic instances, such as when Issa gets fired or when his bike is stolen. The storytelling approach becomes almost monotone, perhaps intentionally so. It details Issa getting fired, meeting a friend, getting a bike, working, and then meeting a girl in one continuous, even narrative strand. The film employs any of the more interesting cinematic arsenal at its disposal, such as a change in music or additional close-ups that might single out key dramatic moments that would imbue the picture with surprise, wonder, or any stronger emotional current.
Tangshir draws some clear parallels between Bicycle Thieves’ sense of hardship and growing anxiety regarding unemployment and Issa’s own struggles. However, the bicycle metaphor itself doesn’t work as well. The bicycle, and its representation of hope lost and hope chased, works wonders in Bicycle Thieves, and it does so largely because the object’s presence/absence is strongly linked to the poverty-stricken (and product-lacking) situation of World War II-battered Rome. However, the same symbolic “bicycle” journey in Anywhere Anytime looks more than a little odd when located within a consumer-driven, product-abundant 21st-century Turin.
Moreover, Tangshir was perhaps so adamant to emulate or pay tribute to the beloved Italian classic that he forgot Issa’s primary tragedy and its source. Arguably, the main tragedy of the situation here is not lacking the means to do a job, as in Bicycle Thieves, where Antonio Ricci was just one man among many of his equally-placed compatriots, but getting a job in the first place as a result of Issa’s uncommon, uncertain position in society. The return of the bike offers a chance for Issa, but it would hardly change his clearly undesirable social status quo. Issa is not just one man among many of his age (as Antonio was in Bicycle Thieves); he is portrayed as a clear outsider in a place where jobs for him are scarce since not many employers would hire undocumented migrants. This is a small but significant difference between Bicycle Thieves and Anywhere Anytime, and by ignoring it, Tangshir lessens his own drama and also our belief in the unfolding narrative.
Hence, whereas the bicycle in De Sica’s film stood for overcoming unemployment in order not to die from starvation, the true symbol of Tangshir’s film is the one never introduced, being something that connects to Issa’s uncertain status in the country — for example, his settlement papers enabling proper employment, and their loss. Ironically, even Issa’s loss of a smartphone, a situation that would also stop his delivery work, would have hit harder for the modern audience than the loss of his bicycle. In this regard, A Better Life (2011), another film that was inspired by De Sica’s film, arguably executed a modern twist on the classic saga better by focusing on a truck instead of a bike.
However, the depiction of a larger crisis is certainly as powerful in Anywhere Anytime as it was in its precedent film, at least on an individual, psychological level. Only, it’s a crisis of a different kind. There’s a sense of alienation, loneliness, and “invisibility” that comes from Issa. In Bicycle Thieves, the nature of the problem was clearly visible to everyone, even if there was no immediate fix; not so with Issa in Anywhere Anytime. Here, the devastation plaguing the young man is completely unknown to a casual passerby taking a glance at a sweaty boy next to them. The last 20 or so minutes of Tangshir’s film, then, features many redeeming qualities, too, and almost culminates in what it should have been doing all along. The camerawork is more imaginative in this stretch, and the story induces more sympathy for Issa, unveils more of his personal history, lets his identity play a larger part in the drama, and hints at Issa’s growing frustration soon snowballing toward anti-hero tendencies.
Ultimately, Anywhere Anytime’s focus on De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves proves to be a bit of a double-edged sword, and, perhaps, more effective methods could have been employed to establish a truly potent drama about these displaced people’s inability to reach their “European Dream.” Still, the clarity of Tangshir’s vision is evident, and his savvy musical choices inject much necessary dynamism into a somewhat predictable plot. It’s also admirable to see the picture’s determination to shed light on contemporary migrants’ precarious socio-economic situation. For an Iranian-born director who emigrated from Iran to Italy in 2011, and who also previously shot one other documentary that deals specifically with the migratory crisis (Displaced), Anywhere Anytime certainly feels all that much more personal and important. In this way, despite some clear faults, it registers as a fairly memorable, resolute eye-opener.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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