It summons those moments in life as a child where you see your parent in a new light, taking actions once unheard of. It’s more of a visceral experience than anything. In fact, “interpretation” seems almost the wrong word here - the humiliation of the father is right there, on the screen, and is experienced between the father and son together. I think this thread has illuminated great nuance to the ending but, barring a rewatch, I’m not sure it changes my initial interpretation. I haven’t watched the film in several years. This is why, while I can see the potential for an optimistic (if not optimistic then ‘silver lining’) reading of the ending, the final scene was for me overpoweringly sad and pessimistic - Antonio is broken by an impersonal world which takes almost all he has and then more. The final shot is from this objective impersonal gaze where Antonio and Bruno dissolve into the crowd, a sad reminder that their issues are, from this view, trivial and common (not to mention the brutal moment where Antonio can barely look at his son, and as he does begins to cry) This is following a Kafka-esque set of interactions with the various government bureaucracies who will not help him. In the end Antonio himself attempts to steal the bike (thereby completing the meaning of the title properly translated as ‘Bicycle thieves’) and so against this reading of ‘Antonio hasn’t lost everything’ my first reaction was that Antonio has in another sense lost more than everything - materialistic loss (the bike, job), as well as spiritual, ethical loss/corruption (he becomes a thief, becomes ‘one of them’). This follows from the earlier scene where he thinks Bruno might have fallen into river, as well as from when Antonio says, “there is a cure for everything except death”. A commonplace reading of the ending that I’ve seen goes something like: Antonio Ricci is finally able to put the loss of his bicycle into perspective as (relatively) trivial, as he has his son, wife, etc.
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