#Thief in the night film movie#

In an interview, lead actor Secăreanu mentions that “many of my friends in Romania know a lot about this situation. They live and breathe and evoke a deep personalized sympathy. The film creates an unusually intimate relationship between the viewer and the helmeted “Everyman.” Neither he nor his family remain abstractions. Human relations are dominated by the daily struggle to survive, which punishes the vulnerable and taxes the nervous system to its limits. The camera in The Bike Thief stays focused on the grim geography of working class life, its narrow confines and regimented rhythms. So, no scooter, no job, no money, no housing, and because the heartless shyster carries no insurance on the vehicle, the triply exploited worker would have to somehow carve money out of his own hide for the moped. Moreover, the owner of the pizza shop is the owner of the motor bike, as well as the Rider’s landlord. But since there are no real criminals in the bunch, the excursion fails. With the help of a teenage resident of the housing estate, he organizes a posse of young boys to help steal a scooter. The stress and menace of his situation grow by the second. He cannot at this point tell his wife, who simultaneously loses her job due to a petty bourgeois wretch of an employer. The desperation then etched on his face reminds one of the look of a man condemned to death.

However, one momentous night, after a shift, his bike is stolen from in front of the pizza shop. His scooter is what keeps the family from falling into homelessness and destitution. The Rider’s reality is a day-to-day grind of dropping his wife at her cleaning job, biking his daughter to school, then working into the night for subsistence wages. His bulbous helmet with dark visor lends a sense of anonymity and self-quarantine as he careens through the impersonal neighborhoods. He needs the income to help support his wife Elena (Anamaria Marinca), teenage daughter Miri (Alexia Maria Proca) and baby son, sheltered in a cramped housing estate apartment. Concentrating within itself the malignant inequality ripping through UK society, London has inevitably become an epicenter of the pandemic.įilmed before the outbreak of COVID-19, The Bike Thief concerns a nameless (simply “the Rider”) Romanian immigrant (Alec Secăreanu) who works as a pizza delivery man motorbiking through the metropolis.

From that point of view, the social divide is far greater in contemporary Britain than it was in postwar Italy.

#Thief in the night film movie#

Through the unfolding of its story, the movie offers a scathing commentary on the whole social structure.Ībout the 1948 work, a critic once noted that “the film-maker obliges the viewer to think, as well as feel, to ponder the question: What needs to be done to make this a truly human society?” (Edward Murray, Ten Film Classics-A Re-Viewing)Ĭhambers’ movie takes place in London, a city characterized by grotesque social inequality and home to hundreds of billionaires and multi-millionaires. There proves to be some genuine substance to the artistic and social connection the new film has to the original classic-to the youthful director’s credit.Īs in the earlier Italian movie, the narrative in The Bike Thief centers on a means of transportation vital to the survival of a worker and his family. In its title and subject matter, the movie pays deliberate and admiring tribute to the famed 1948 Italian neorealist film, Bicycle Thieves ( Ladri di biciclette -US title, The Bicycle Thief ), directed by Vittorio De Sica (1902-1974). British filmmaker Matt Chambers’ feature debut The Bike Thief is a harrowing drama about an impoverished immigrant family living in London.