a dangerous saint
by Douglas Messerli
Roberto
Rossellini (story), Sandro De Feo, Mario Pannunzio, Ivo Perilli, and Brunello
Rondi (writers), Roberto Rossellini (director) Europa ’51 / 1952, USA 1954

In the midst of his tales of unhappiness,
Irene rushes to the kitchen to remind the cook that one of the guests must have
something light to eat and to check on the champagne. By the time she returns
to the bedroom Michele, angry with his mother’s inattention, mocks a gesture of
hanging himself.
One of the guests brings the young boy a
train, but when Michele is called down to receive it, he seems disinterested in
the “toy”; although politely greeting, as he is told to, each of the dinner
guests, he exits by leaving the gift behind.
George is disturbed about the boy, whom,
it appears, is not coping well with the loss of his nurse and, having suffered
World War II in England with his mother, has grown up, is clearly too dependent
upon her love. There are even obvious suggestions here of abnormal desires, for
when his mother goes up to kiss him goodnight, she finds him naked under the
covers, for which she scolds him.
The dinner itself, although festive in
appearance, seems a rather staid affair, Irene constantly attempting to shift
topics as Andrea begins to express his ideas. He is a Communist, an idealist
with regard to the future, while one of the guests is an obvious pessimist,
convinced there will be further war. Soon after their aborted discussion, we
hear a scream. Michele has fallen to the floor down flights of several stairs,
an attempt, we later discover, at suicide.
Throughout these horrifying early scenes
of Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 the
camera has followed Irene’s actions with near whirlwind velocity, the scenes
conveying—in what is quite unusual in this director’s films—a near
claustrophobic intensity. Even in the following scene, as Irene, grief-stricken
and exhausted with sorrow, lies in a near cationic state in her bed, Rossellini
suggests the self-absorption of this couple’s lives by having George take a
business call as he sits in seeming solicitude beside Irene’s sick bed. He has
only hackneyed prescriptions for her: she must get more rest, she must put the
incident behind her and return to life.
Indeed, throughout these early episodes
Irene is almost speechless, especially when her husband and mother try to
comprehend where she has been each day. Irene’s dress and appearance, as she
wanders, has become disheveled, her clothes those of a dowdy street person, and
it is not long after, having discovered what she has been reading, that her
mother warns her of her political sins and her husband begins to suspect that
she has fallen in love with Andrea.
Rossellini—although he has a great deal to
tell us—does not lecture, dropping his major vocal provocateur, Andrea, soon
after, while Irene acts more and more instinctually, herself wondering at
times, whether she has lost her mind. Discovering a sickly prostitute, who she
has met earlier on, and who has now just been beaten by her fellow street
walkers. Irene takes her home, calling a doctor who tells her the girl, sick
with tuberculosis, has only a few more days to live. This time, instead of
returning “home,” Irene stays with the girl until she dies. When she goes next
door to report the girl’s death to the neighbors who son had previously been
ill, she finds an elder son holding them hostage with a gun. He has just
attempted a nearly robbery. Suddenly finding new force within, she demands he
hand her the gun as she helps him to escape, but also demands that he “turn
himself into the police.”
So much unconditional love, like that of
St. Francis of Assisi, Rossellini hints, must eventually be checked in a world
of Europe 1951, with its post-war consumerist and selfish values. The police
arrest her, questioning her activities over the last several weeks. Accused of
having had an affair with her cousin and/or others, she is freed only to be
committed to a mental institution by her husband and family.
For
a few moments, it almost appears that Rossellini’s film might devolve into a
work like Anatole Litvak’s overwrought The
Snake Pit of three years before. But instead of reacting in horror and
revulsion to the open and often hostile stares of her fellow inmates, Irene,
having now truly reached a kind of saintliness, finds her new home a place for
reflection and penance. When questioned by psychiatrists and judicators, Irene,
with the kind of subtle sophistication of Joan of Arc, answers with both
humility and cleverness. She does not see her role as a savior, does not
embrace any of the ideologies which might have saved her, but, having truly
found freedom, has created her own moral creed:
The love we feel for those
closest to us, for those who should
be and maybe really are
dearest to us, suddenly isn’t enough. It
seems too selfish, too
narrow, so that we feel the to share it, to
make our love bigger, until
it embraces everyone.
It is a far too radical statement for the
conventional society in which she lives, more radical than even the political
and spiritual values expressed by others. She is condemned to live out her
radical sanity in an institution devoted to curing her of her misconceptions.
But Rossellini brilliantly demonstrates that she is now so free that she has
been completely transformed. As her poor friends, on a visit to the institution
to see her, chant below about her sainthood, the bars of her new prison seem
almost to float away, to melt in the gentle smile of Irene’s inner vision. The
woman who had no time to talk to her son, suddenly has all the time in the world
to speak to those she loves, including her fellow prisoners.
Clearly, Rossellini’s film, in this
sense, was also too radical in its social and moral implications. Although
there have been a few quite intelligent commentaries on the work, relatively
little attention has been paid to this—one of the director’s most appealing and
representative films—in comparison with the other two works which he created
with his wife, Ingrid Bergman. Together, I would argue, these three films stand
as some of the greatest works of post-war Italian cinema!
Los Angeles,
November 20, 2013
very nice appreciation. Rossellini is such a great and intelligent director. Flowers of St. Francis is one of my 10 all time favorite films.
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