a dangerous saint
by Douglas Messerli
Roberto Rossellini (story), Sandro
De Feo, Mario Pannunzio, Ivo Perilli, and Brunello Rondi (screenplay), 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.
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.
The
horrified parents rush the child to the hospital, where the doctor assures them
that he has suffered only a broken femur, and that he will survive. But with
his fall, something within the busy hostess has changed, which she begins to
reveal the moment Michele is returned home. If before she was inattentive to
him, she now almost devours him; laying her head next to his, she assures him
that she will leave him alone again, reminding him of their painful adventures
in England together. The moment she does leave him in the hands of a nurse, he
dies—at least in the Italian version of the film—of a blood clot.
What he and others have not prepared for is “precisely” that she will soon put the past behind her and return to life in a manner far more involved that she has previously lived it. It begins with a visit to her journalist cousin, Andrea (Ettore Giannini) who tells her a story of a poor Italian family who can hardly eke out a living, and cannot afford to pay for the medicines for their sickly son. As if she had never before imagined such poverty, she quickly suggests that she can pay for their medicines, and Andrea takes her to see the family and give them the money. Invited in for a drink, Irene witnesses their love and joy in each other, and experiences a world she has never before known. Although the room in which the family is gathered is a small one, filled with family members and others from the project who pop in from time to time, this scene appears, in comparison with her many-roomed dwelling, almost spacious; and from this time forward Rossellini’s film will dispassionately witness an entire world that opens the audience and the mind of its central hero ever outward. Suddenly emerging from her bed, Irene begins long voyages throughout Rome, particularly to the poorer neighborhoods, slowly picking up information along the way while meeting starving post-World War II street urchins and a wonderfully exuberant woman, Giulietta, detta Passerotto (Giulietta Masina), who has several children, some of them her own, others who have simply joined up with her little family.
At first, she
meets regularly with Andrea, who admits that he has always loved her. She reads
his socialist and Communist books, but determines that it is still not the
right route for her, particularly after substituting for her friend Giuletta,
in a factory for two days. There she discovers work does not ennoble them, but
abuses them like slaves. In her desire to love without bounds, including her
dead son, she, accordingly, turns briefly to the spiritual, entering a church
for solace and prayer. But here, in the overwrought glory of church wealth, she
also finds it difficult to find what she is seeking, which Rossellini expresses
in her brief goodbye to the church with the simple gesture of the cross,
forehead to stomach, breast to breast.
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 whose son had previously been ill, she finds an elder son holding
them hostage with a gun. He has just attempted a nearby robbery. Suddenly
finding a 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.”
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
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2013).
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