Giovanni works as a welder in a Milanese factory. His superiors offer him a job in their dependance in Sicily with the prospect of a promotion. Giovanni accepts the offer, to the resentment of his long-time fiancée Liliana. While he tries to get accustomed to his new surroundings, he remembers both moments of estrangement from and mutual happiness with her. He starts exchanging increasingly candid and emotional letters with Liliana, who states that maybe their physical distance has re-awakened the love in their habitual relationship.
In his May 1963 review for Il Giorno, Piero Bianchi titled The Fiancés "a subtle elegy, a work in a minor but accurate and profound tone", also commending Olmi's choice of the main actors.[2]
Upon the film's regular cinema opening in New York in January 1964, Bosley CrowtherofThe New York Times certified Olmi "a remarkable ability to make images speak" and The Fiancés a "profound agitation of mood", but also pointed out a lack of "large-scale social comment and implications of irony" which he had found in the director's earlier The Sound of Trumpets.[4]
