Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

jacobs-greenwood María José (Lucia Bosé, Miss Italy 1947) and Juan Fernandes Soler (Alberto Closas) are returning from their illicit affair, weekend in the country, in her car when she hits and injures the titled bicyclist on a desolate wet roadway. They stop and Juan is unsure whether the accident victim has been mortally wounded or can be saved (e.g. with proper medical attention), or not. María, the one who's cheating on her rich husband Miguel de Castro (Otello Toso), calls to Juan twice, the second time more sternly, urging him to leave the scene with her (turning their moral sin into a criminal one as well). Juan later reads an item in the newspaper titled "Death of a Cyclist" which confirms his worst fears.The rest of the film is about the way in which María and Juan deal with their guilt. Their situation and anxiety is exacerbated by an art critic-pianist named Rafael "Rafa" Sandoval (Carlos Casaravilla), whose talents enable him to hobnob in high society, though he resents not being wealthy like everyone else. Rafa suspects that María and Juan, who were childhood sweethearts before the war, are having an affair. When he implies to María that he's aware of what's going on, and threatens her with blackmail, she's worried that Rafa also knows about the accidental death. Juan, who'd gotten his job as an adjunct professor thanks to his well connected brother at the university, has a complication of his own: distracted by the ordeal while on the job, he'd caused a student named Matilde Luque (Bruna Corrà) to fail her exam. This causes a riotous uprising of righteousness by her fellow students who contend that Juan is the beneficiary of nepotism.The end of the film, which was directed and written by Juan Antonio Bardem (based on a story by Luis Fernando de Igoa) and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year, has its own symmetry.

mevrendi I guess the film tries to show that the bourgeois family is full of lies. More so, bourgeois woman. I am not sure if the emphasis on bourgeois-ness is intentional though. The story told is an age-old story, and the setting --i.e. the upper class environment-- is still a puzzle for me. As I said, I am not sure whether this setting was intentional or not. The ending makes you think that it is not.Unlike the change of tone of the music used towards the end, suspense does not continue in a strongly manner. Plot runs as it is expected. I was hoping to get a little bit more about the witty intellectual but it turns out it is just a medium of distraction for the audience. One might think that it is what accelerates the tension, but I hardly think so. I also think that husband's passive role and Juan's conscientious pain which gives him hard times do not coalesce in a way that it makes more sense.At the the end, movie ends up with a women seeking to preserve her current social status no matter the cost is. As a moral relief, director kills her so that we can finish the movie in peace. Despite the well-organized structure of the movie, I think that moral guilt of the man vs. immorality of the women is not a nice story. Nevertheless, I should say that the husband who does not want to know much but willing to forget everything fits to the general picture about him depicted earlier.

o_cubitt Bardem's 'Death of a Cyclist' sees illicit lovers choose not to help the dead cyclist in question nor admit to their guilt. Forced to share this murderous secret their love affair turns torrid. Rafa the self penned 'Critic' of Spain archly ignites the touchpaper that sees the couple forcing themselves into making a decision about whether or not to live with the secret. They then both make their fateful decisions...Although much has been made of the ending, and that the ending is not something he agreed to, however it seems to offer hope for a society that at the time had been torn apart and in part corrupted by a violence and self aggrandisement. Juan's actions in the third act also hint at a goodness at the heart of the wormy apple.One for those who liked Malle's 'Lift to the Scaffold' and 'Double Indemnity'.

harrisoncohen Breaking the RulesJuan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist)The Formation of a Unique Hybrid of Spanish Cinema1955. At the height of the cold war, almost twenty years under the Franco regime, Spain, a country fiercely divided by poverty and societal division prepares with the support of the United States, to enter into the United Nations. American investors arrive in Spain for the chance to buy into the developing Spanish economy. Meanwhile on a cold winter's day, dusk is falling and the Sun's dying rays hit the highway. Enrique Arízaga cycles past and off into the outlying horizon. Almost as soon as he has gone out of sight, a screeching of brakes is heard in the distance and a black car slams to a halt around the bend; the cricket chirps. A man jumps out and rushes over. On observing the cyclist is still breathing, he calls over to the woman, inside the car. She gets out and calls back over to him. The woman beckons him again to desert the scene of the accident, leaving the cyclist to die. The car moves off again disappearing towards Madrid.In the immediacy of its establishing sequence, Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) already outlines the foundations and circumstances behind the film's plot. An adulterous couple, Juan (Alberto Closas) and María José (Lucia Bosè) run down a cyclist on their way back to Madrid after a clandestine meeting in the outskirts. Rather than call for help the couple, fearful of the discovery of their adulterous relationship, flee the scene of the accident. Bardem's film focuses on the tribulations and strains on the characters' relationship from that point onwards and the lengths they go to keep their crimes of adultery and murder under cover.Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002) explored and made use of a variety of genres within his early career. In Esa pareja feliz (1951) and ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! (1953), both joint ventures with contemporary Luis García Berlanga, Bardem through the conventions of comedy was able to develop a structure of parody and political satire. In Cómicos (1954), Bardem was heavily influenced by the genre of Hollywood melodrama, in particular that of films such as All About Eve (1950), a convention he would continue to develop throughout later films including Calle Mayor (1956). Throughout Muerte de un ciclista Bardem develops a compound of contrasting style and genre to represent key issues within Spanish society. Prominent themes and genres within the film include film noir and the femme fatale mould, the Hitchcock suspense thriller, Italian neo-realism and soviet montage. Bardem uses these contrasting elements directly after one another in order to create what Marsha Kinder refers to as a 'rupture' within the centrality of the plot of the Hollywood melodrama. In the same way as the unnatural cutting and contrasting imagery Bardem uses, the film is able to ideologically expose corrupt and immoral elements of the Franco regime. The focus of this essay is to explore and to investigate these various elements and analyse the way in which they come together in forming a hybrid that is unique within the history of Spanish cinema.Through the usage of a variety of contrasting elements and genre Bardem is able to ideologically expose the corrupt elements of the Franco regime. Today Muerte de un ciclista stands as a critique of the conformist values that it ridicules and attempts to tear apart. It breaks all the rules and shows the power of cinema to revolutionise daily life. In the same way as Bardem's characters of María José who breaks the conformist gender rules of Francoist Spain, Matilde who rebels against the institutional system and Juan who goes against the corruption and falseness of his class background, so too does Muerte de un ciclista rebel both by taking a stand against the corrupt Franco regime and also by breaking the rules of mainstream conventional cinema in order to present something vitally fresh and unique in Spanish film. Alfred Hitchcock once noted that it is important to know the limits of commercial cinema. Bardem is able to successfully use a clash of genre to stretch the viewer close to an absolute limit and is subsequently able to breakdown and underline the key political issues surrounding contemporary Spanish society. In the same way as the moral courage that the character of Juan is able to attain, Bardem seeks to signify the same moral fibre that the Spanish regime strove to repress. Like the broken window imagery that Bardem puts forward towards the end of the film, so too does a hole within the melodramatic centrality serve as a central element within the film's plot in order to be clashed with and torn apart. It is through this hybrid and "rupture" of genre that Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista has been able to create a quintessential feat in Spanish cinema.Harrison Cohen"What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" – Lady Macbeth