The young man played by Sandro Panseri in Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” (“The Job”, in English; or elsewhere titled “The Sound of Trumpets”) fits an Everyman sort of mold, personality-wise, but he also—just slightly, to me—resembles a young Kafka. He has that same dark-browed, thin and angular quality to him, but also a kind of unintrusive watchfulness one might imagine the Czech writer possessed in his late teens/early twenties, coupled with a quaint naivete to his own appeal. More saliently than mere physical resemblance, however, “Il Posto” examines its bureaucracy-enveloped subjects with a satirical edge, though the film is more often than not content to simply depict rather than outright excoriate through Kafkaesque absurdity.

Such a move comfortably places Olmi’s “Il Posto” along the same continuum as the preceding Italian Neorealist movement of his motherland, and such classics as those created by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Is it as good as something like, say, De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”? I’d wager not, as it lacks the earlier film’s emotional heft and larger societal commentary—but so do most films. Hierarchies notwithstanding, “Il Posto” might be one of the best portrayals of what it is like to work one’s first job, and of workplace culture, in general. It also manages to fit in an almost hyper-realistic depiction of young romance without cost to the film’s fleet 97-minute runtime. […]