Europe '51

EUROPE '51   ***1/2

Roberto Rossellini

1952

IDEA:  In the wake of her young son's death, a socialite in postwar Italy embraces humanitarianism, to the chagrin of her social circle.

BLURB:  As timely as ever, Europe ’51 considers a humanist ethics of responsibility to the Other that seems to be chronically lost in the modern Western world. With emotional grandeur that never becomes mawkish or simplistic, Rossellini and Bergman chart the moral awakening and flowering social conscience of a petit bourgeoisie woman shocked out of her complacency by personal tragedy. Her worldview expands in tandem with Rossellini’s mise en scène, moving out from the enclosed environment of a luxury high-rise apartment to the arid open spaces around tenement buildings where she joins the huddled masses. Europe ’51 nimbly resits the obvious path of framing Irene as a savior, or as a guilt-wracked, self-abnegating repenter. Instead, it uses her altruistic mission to reflect the parochial and hypocritical institutions that condemn a woman who dares to act outside of her social role. Too benevolent for the militant Left as represented by her cousin Andrea, Irene’s unconditional maternal embrace of the discarded underclass also rankles the Church, which views her actions as a kind of promiscuity blurring the mother/whore divide. In a modern social tragedy redolent of Joan of Arc (a former Bergman role), Irene’s practice of empathy as a fundamental human duty is seen as a radical intervention in a hierarchical society calcified into self-interest. By the end, ironically back in an enclosed place, she is not so much a martyred saint as a woman who has chosen, against ideological prescriptions, to be human.

Toute une nuit

TOUTE UNE NUIT   ***1/2

Chantal Akerman

1982

IDEA:  A myriad of couples meet and part over one night in Brussels.

BLURB:  Toute une nuit takes to another level the austere formal abstraction Chantal Akerman demonstrated with Hotel Monterey. Where that film used long, static takes to defamiliarize a building’s passageways, flattening them into their constituent graphic parts, Toute une nuit is guided by a visual principle of tenebrism. In an inky-black nighttime that sometimes confounds spatial orientation, splashes of light give shape to the contours of the world and its inhabitants. A shoulder or face is accented by a ray of chartreuse; walls, doors, and windows are adumbrated by strokes and swaths of teal. This shadowy nocturnal world of tenuous contiguity is the perfect host for Akerman’s elliptical (anti)drama, in which an array of anonymous characters come and go, meet and part, rarely seeming able to connect. Their perfunctory dialogue and abrupt dalliances are parodies of (largely) heteronormative romantic rituals, draining melodramatic emotion from scenarios where mainstream media has conditioned us to expect it. In the apparent paucity of meaningful, lasting human connection, Toute une nuit paints a vignetted portrait of urban loneliness as aching as it is glumly gorgeous, like a series of Edward Hopper paintings come to life. Akerman’s narrative minimalism and droll, deadpan refusal of naturalism can be seen in the works of contemporary filmmakers from Jim Jarmusch to Pedro Costa and Tsai Ming-liang, but her voice and style remain utterly unique in their attunement to an underworld of bruised human feeling.