I love this movie so much

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This movie deals really with problems that have to do simultaneously with individual conscience and social questions in this world of ours. This is too deep a theme to be efficiently put in cinema and the movie resents this. However that beautiful woman and great actress called Ingrid Bergman takes us more or less well into these complicated moral, psychological and social entanglements. A rich woman becomes after her son's (still a child) suicide, possessed by the feeling that she has been very selfish till then and must now care about the poor people's situation and problems. She leaves her home and her husband and starts helping necessitous persons financially and personally. She ends by being considered mentally sick and is interned by her family in a psychiatric clinic. This is the contradiction between our society and the radical altruists an aspect that the movie treats only maybe a bit superficially concentrating itself more on the protagonist's psychological problem. Not a masterpiece but a good film anyway.

An allegorical tale of how devastating grief can be transformative. Ingrid Bergman turns in a powerful performance as a woman of privilege who realizes her errors too late -- following the death of her only child, a sensitive young boy. It takes this tragedy to enable Irene to empathize with the suffering of her fellow man. Set against a backdrop of post-WWII Italy, where socialist values are seething among the poor, "Europa '51" does a creditable job of portraying the gulf that develops between the newly enlightened Irene and her loved ones. Her family's bewilderment is so great that they shut her away in a mental institution, but there is a hopeful message here: Irene can never truly be isolated -- because her insights enable her to form bonds with whomever she meets. Irene's unswerving selflessness sometimes borders on the saintly. But I see this film as symbolic so its excesses didn't detract much. However, sometimes the movie is a little preachy. Black-and-white thinking along the lines of "rich people are bad and poor people are wonderful" got in the way of a compelling case study.In addition, the version that I caught on TCM was crudely dubbed, with side characters like Giuliatta Masina's coming across as Brookynesque. Mama mia! Its flaws aside, this is a powerful film for anyone interested in psychological development.

I attended a National Film Theatre screening as part of a Bergman season. The film was introduced as one that critical America found hard to bear, not least as the deserting Hollywood star Bergman had an affair with the director, Rossellini.I mention this as the film, which charts the resolution of personal crisis in the life of a bourgeois socialite, is a extremely open and even-handed critique of European social politics. Rossellini presents Irene Girard as having an epiphany in which she appears to be ideologically seduced by an activist of the left. This would have been particularly irritating to the HUAC who were experiencing a rash of films as backlash to their Hollywood blacklist of 1947 and would explain critical hostility to the film and Bergman personally.In fact, It becomes clear that Rossellini manages the extraordinary achievement of charting an ideological third way for Irene. She throws herself into her naive acts of charity somewhat haphazardly (though convincingly). She is subsequently appalled by the 'coal-face' realities of having to work in a factory. Her non-partisan political ineptitude is the reason she is eventually committed to an asylum.For me, Europa 51 is not simply the sad but noble tale of a grieving mother finding a unique way in which to sublimate her grief and guilt. Rossellini has concocted a sophisticated analogy for the poised, unresolvable social position of European society; an analogy that translates into the more digestible position of a single, normal, rational individual. It has the same, marvellous objectivity that one feels when watching the morally neutral Badlands, for example.There are a host of imperfections (not least in the tatty, French sub-titled print we were treated to!) in this film. Only so many can be put down to the rise of the (French) New Wave and the acting can be changeable. Bergman however is very fine, giving a multi-faceted performance that never veers off into incredibility even - especially - at the poignant, potentially confusing final scene/shot. Alexander Knox is also fine. A raw jewel of a movie. 8/10

It's a bit melodramatic, but up until Irene's final conversation with Cassatti the Commie, *Europa '51* is a very interesting film, first about a pampered rich woman's reaction to her son's death, then about the difference between windy Marxist propaganda and real compassion.However, at that point, Rossellini's original idea takes over: He wanted to make a film about what would happen if a truly saintly person ever showed up in the modern world. And he had a very good idea of what would happen--or at least a very insistent one. The people here obviously behave the way they do solely to make the point Rossellini wants to make, even when their behavior doesn't seem very plausible. In defter hands, such manipulation can work. Here, though, you can see the tracks Rossellini has rather clumsily laid down to move the story where he wants it to go.