Europa '51

“I'm going to make a film about St. Francis, but he's going to be a woman and she's going to be you,” Bergman recalled being told by her then husband Rossellini as he began developing the idea that would become Europa '51. Bergman plays Irene, a well-to-do wife whose comfortably unexamined existence is upended by the death of her child. Seeking meaning, she ventures into the working-class districts of Rome, exploring and abandoning political and religious answers before finding her own kind of faith, which her relatives, doctors, and even a priest diagnose as madness. Bergman's performance of grief is remarkable for its inwardness and avoidance of histrionics. Her version of sainthood-and Rossellini's-is ecstatic but not exalted, not of some other, better world, but of this imperfect and painfully beautiful human one.

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