"People often talk about this film’s main character, Antonio Ricci, as if he’s some kind of allegorical everyman at the mercy of his circumstances. In fact, he is heartbreakingly specific. He almost misses out on the poster-hanging job because he’s dawdling behind the other men waiting for job announcements. He fails to notice his wife struggling with two heavy water buckets before he helps her out. He’s careless with his bike and does a lousy job of pasting up his first poster, leaving it full of lumps. He often takes off running without looking back for his son Bruno. He doesn’t notice when Bruno falls down in the busy street and at one point leaves him in the market to be preyed on by a pedophile. Bruno, on the other hand, shuts an open window to protect his baby sibling sleeping nearby. He shoves a priest out of the way who stands in front of him. He cuts in line when visiting the fortune-teller La Santona, fetches the cop when the thief is found, and saves his father from prison. These moments of characterization build and build to the point where seeing Bruno see his father’s hat on the ground is almost unbearable. When the distraught Bruno takes Antonio’s disgraced hand in the end, what we feel for them is overwhelming."