Europa '51

Europa '51 (1952) is Roberto Rossellini's drama starring Ingrid Bergman, available to watch online as one of the defining works of postwar Italian cinema. Irene, a wealthy American living in Rome, drifts through a glittering, hollow life — until her young son takes his own life.

Crushed by guilt, Irene starts looking for meaning in places she never noticed before. She gives herself to the city's poor: a dying prostitute, a mother of six, the workers of the outer districts. The deeper she pours herself into other people's suffering, the more alarmed her own circle becomes. To her husband, her compassion stops looking like charity and starts looking like illness. The final break with her family poses a question the film refuses to settle: where does sainthood end and madness begin. Giulietta Masina appears in a small but pointed role beside Bergman.

Rossellini frames it almost as a parable of a modern saint dropped into the cold arithmetic of bourgeois life. Slow, austere and free of sentiment, it's made for anyone who loves neorealism and the great European cinema of the 1950s. Stream Europa '51 (1952) online on iFILM.