The Use of Mirrors

Europe '51

Directed by Roberto Rossellini

(1952)

As the title suggests, Rossellini made the movie in 1952 about the problems of postwar Europe. Ingrid Bergman is a Northern European socialite living in Italy. He made the movie after The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), an episodic film about the life of St. Francis, who had founded the order of San Franciscan monks.

While making the movie, he asked himself what people would say if St. Francis returned in modern times, and the immediate answer was that he would be called crazy. 

Based on such preliminary notions, Rossellini set up to make a movie with Ingrid Bergman as a person immersed in her frivolous life; she neglects her only son, creating an unpleasant environment for him, which ultimately leads to his suicide. Struggling with a sense of guilt, she finds peace on her trips to the southern skirts of Rome and helping poor people. Like Mizoguchi and Renoir, Rossellini works with a completely abstract theme; here, a socialite withdraws from the bourgeois lifestyle and becomes a devotee of poor people. His presentation of the theme is so powerful that the audience does not think the narrative is a fable. 

The movie starts with a party she is hosting. She arrives home late as the guests begin to come in. She rushes to make herself ready, sits down at her vanity table when we see her reflection in the mirror and starts to work on her hair. Her son constantly tries to have her attention, but he fails. Overwhelmed by her complacency, she does not think her behavior may have an unfortunate outcome.

A triangle of her, her image and the son, as she works her hair. It seems she has a split personality, and only one of them can relate to her son. There is no line of gaze on her part.

She leaves her seat to pick up her dress for a moment, and the son takes her place. Now, we see the son in the mirror. He is playing nervously with a band; suddenly, he puts the band around his neck and pulls it as if trying to suffocate himself. She is busy with her dress and fails to see the warning sign that her son is profoundly disturbed. Later, she was told that her son's fall was not accidental. 

He tightens the band around his neck, while she is changing her clothes.

The two shots of the mirror demonstrate their relationship in some detail. Bergman's shot reveals her complacency as she tries to give her hair a beautiful look and ignores her son's desperate attempts to connect with her. The son's shot further underlines her oblivion, as the son shows his distress, maybe unconsciously trying to signal his mother, but she is nowhere to be found. 

—Naser Mojtahed

Europe '51 can be streamed online: Look for it on MAX, Max Amazon Channel, Criterion Collection, and the TCM Amazon Channel