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.