Has any other filmmaker displayed Rossellini's ability to consistently capture miracles? EUROPE '51 starts with the nominal language of melodrama before a shock ruptures the formalism and unleashes something else upon the world. And I mean "world" not in its artistic conception of a work's diegetic reality but in the actual sense of the world around us, of a separate but connected web of people who share a moral responsibility toward one another. The tragedy that befalls Bergman in the first act might have been the cruel punishment to end most films, but by positioning it so early, Rossellini forces a confrontation with the world that opens up the frame (and deftly critiques communism's myopic materialism in favor of a form of Christianity that looks like communism taken one further). Rossellini casts Bergman as a modern St. Francis, yet in practice and in the reaction of her social peers, she resembles the returned Christ of the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, a being of pure, unegotistical altruism who threatens the status quo. Yet Rossellini does not despair in this but finds humanity wherever, even from behind the bars of a metal institution. Surely no other film has ever ended so positively with its good-natured protagonist in captivity.
