When young Domenico ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company. The prospects are daunting, but Domenico finds reason for hope in the fetching Antonietta.

Ermanno Olmi’s extraordinarily deft post-neorealist masterpiece shades hushed observations of youthful awakening into droll sketches of a modernizing Italy. Caged by the steel-and-glass abstractions of Milan’s proliferating officescape, Il Posto draws mordant absurdism from humanist verismo.