Analyzing Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi 1962) in The Cinema of Economic Miracles, Angelo Restivo underscores the explosion in ownership of two products definitive in shaping modern Italy as a society of consumption, mobility, and spectacle: television and the car (45). In the opening scene, the film’s protagonist, Bruno searches for a telephone [Figure 1-2]. Thus, setting off the events of the film’s narrative, which proceed as a “series of missed encounters,”(57) the first being Bruno’s failure to reach the woman he is trying to call but leading him to meeting Roberto [Fig. 3]. Restivo argues that Bruno (Vittorio Gasman) stands as a figure for an “obsessive mobility” (58) literalized in the film as an aleatory car journey, a giro or spin, from Rome to the riviera over the ferragosto holiday. In the film’s beach scenes, we encounter a picture of “the social totality that is ‘Italy,’” (58) discontinuous images of which we have already encountered all along the journey. Bruno and Roberto’s drive is in this case the synonymous space where unfolds the true drive of the film: the course through which to present a discourse on modernization and ensuing intensifications of mobilization and consumerism (shots and sequences frequently compare historic and changing modes of mobility: trains, ships, motorbikes, and outmoded autos) [Fig. 4]. A recurring motif in the film is the broken machine, most memorably the broken cigarette machine (58), a motif which culminates with the melodramatic car crash at the film’s end and Roberto’s death. Here, Restivo’s analysis invokes a semiotic square [Fig. 5], interpreting Roberto’s death as a symptom of the real historical contradiction between the traditional work ethic and the new leisure mobility that stands in for the failure of the cultural imaginary to envision the new class of technocrats administering the economic miracle (the square’s empty complex term) (60). 

Comparing Il Sorpasso to the recent Romanian film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude 2023), it is clear that technological innovations in today’s era of the mobile Internet have seemingly sutured the principal contrary at work in Il Sorpasso. The labor of precarious gig-workers, like Do Not Expect’s Angela (Ilinca Manolache) [Fig. 6-7] who works a 16-hour shift as a driver for a production company, now fill in the previously unimaginable. Jude’s film like Risi’s unveils as drive, mapping contemporary Bucharest, yet the picture of a social totality no longer exists to appear. Rather, seriality in the Sartrean sense: nomadic if monadic characters whose paths cross while fulfilling tasks set by the agendas of multinational corporations. Like Bruno and Roberto’s before her, Angela’s course exposes the viewer to a variety of local types, but her social interactions occur only by appointment as scripted video interviews with victims of on-the-job injuries who, competing for a small monetary award in exchange for declining to proceed with workers’ comps suits, audition to appear in a corporate promotional video, scapegoated for their injuries [Fig. 8]. Largely, however, Angela’s day is spent alone in her car, following a route prescribed by temporary employers and managed remote via GPS. As opposed to the one-car crash—ominously if literally both off the edge and over the cliff —at the end of Il Sorpasso [Fig. 9], a seemingly unending montage sequence in Do Not Expect documents countless roadside and makeshift memorial markers [Fig. 10-11] that line Bucharest’s most notoriously dangerous street ,painstakingly and ritualistically accounting for a now inhuman and insatiable demand to make mobility pay.