While not a great film, Roberto
Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952) is valuable
in that it highlights the distinction in how actors were used by the neorealist
directors. Ingrid Bergman, (Rossellini’s
wife) was well known as both a film star and a beauty by the time she made this
movie. She’d become an international
star by going to Hollywood for Casablanca
(1942), and had spent much of the subsequent ten years making quality
studio pictures. Any good review of Casablanca notes how DP Arthur Edeson
and Director Michael Curtiz filmed Bergman’s eyes. They seem to sparkle, but not like Judy
Garland’s. She seems always to be two
breaths away from tears, but with stylized lighting she looks not unlike an
angel. That’s how Hollywood wanted her
to look.
Here, Rossellini wasn’t interested
in her angelic qualities (at least not on screen). Is she beautiful in this film? Yes, but it’s
a colder, sharper beauty. His lighting
is harsher. There’s no sparkle. Holding a still of a Bergman close-up from
both films next to one another would be all the juxtaposition necessary to explain
neorealism, and might also present a strong case for why both lighting and
makeup are Oscar categories.
From a career standpoint, Europa ’51 was a bridge for Rossellini. He was beginning to move away from the harder,
rubble in the streets of Rome films that had defined the early neorealism
movement. With Bergman, he had made Stromboli (1950) two years before, which
had centered on the harsh lives of a Mediterranean fishing village. But that same year he’d also made the period
piece The Flowers of St. Francis
(also 1950), and he was interested in seeing how the emotional realism which he’d
focused on in that film would play in a contemporary setting. He decided that the best approach would be allegorical,
and so he chose to focus on a character who much like St. Francis, was
initially shielded from the sad realities of the world. He also chose to make the character a woman.
Bergman is Irene, a married mother
who appears to spend much of her life concerned with upcoming social
functions. She loves her husband, George
(Alexander Knox), and her son, Michele (Sandro Franchina), but she doesn’t seem
to have time for them. She is
particularly neglectful of Michele as she prepares to host a dinner party in
the film’s first act. However, when the
boy suffers a fall down the open stairwell of their apartment building, her attentions
return to him. She vows to be a better
mother, and to never leave his bedside while he recovers at the hospital. Though an initial diagnosis seems to indicate
that Michele will survive the fall, speculation arises about whether he
intended to commit suicide. Then he
develops a blood clot and suddenly dies.
Irene is devastated. She is bedridden with grief. She eventually tries to face the world, but
she finds herself more interested now in alleviating the suffering of others than
with her previous selfish concerns. She
walks through the poorest districts of Rome, and is surprised to see kids
laughing. She meets a woman with six
children, and marvels at how she manages them all. She saves a prostitute who is suffering from tuberculosis,
acting as her Good Samaritan guardian.
She gets the mother of six a factory job, and is then shocked when she
sees the working conditions. Her actions
begin to drive a wedge between her and her husband, especially when he begins
to suspect that she’s developed a relationship with a communist friend.
Irene’s acts of goodness bring her
genuine comfort. She feels at last as
though she were living a life of meaning.
She appears to make peace with God about Michele’s death. She helps a boy who is running from the police
after a robbery, but encourages him to turn himself in. She’s arrested as an accomplice. Like St. Francis, her righteousness is
misunderstood.
Rossellini was often drawn toward
characters that were trapped in situations beyond their control. WWII gave him all of the material he needed
to tell such stories, and his best film, Paisan
(1946), is a collection of them. By 1951
the war was over, and the cleanup of Europe was in full swing. He knew that the world was changing and that
cinema would change with it, and he didn’t want to continue making the same
film again and again. Irene’s decision
to move on from the tragic death of her son is his decision to let the tragedies
of the war lie. He would move forward
into his embrace of emotional realism over social realism with his next collaboration
with Bergman, Voyage in Italy (1954;
# 18).
With Europa ’51 Rossellini gives us a film that is less than the sum of
its parts. Bergman’s performance is
central to the movie, and it is good, but her Italian voiceover by Lydia
Simoneschi (her regular) leaves out the possibility of genuine emotion. (I’d probably have enjoyed the film much more
if Bergman’s original English had been included in the version available online. I suspect however that whatever company holds
the rights to the US distribution version would have released it by now if they
imagined it would be profitable.) Bergman also seems perhaps too detached at the
film’s outset for us to believe her transition.
The picture is at its best when she’s wandering the streets and gutters,
and is lacking when Irene is confined to her apartment. Obviously this is the point, she’s alive
again when she takes to the streets, but there’s something a bit off about Rossellini’s
tone in both the early and late dialogue sequences. As such, the film feels like a collection of
well-structured scenes bookended by mediocre, almost soap opera-esque melodrama.
Language:
Italian (dubbed; limited scenes available in English on TCM.com) NST
Runtime:
113 Minutes
Available
@Youtube.com
Grade:
2 Hats off
