The here-and-now thrust of the title puts the dynamics of Roberto Rossellini's moral trek right up front -- a cri de couer over post-war wreckage, built, as in Germany Year Zero, around a child's anguished leap into the precipice. Like young Edmund's suicide in the earlier film, here the boy's (Sandro Franchina) jump down the stairs reveals similarly inconsolable spiritual pain, though the tragedy triggers a beginning rather than an end: the rebirth of Ingrid Bergman, in the outset a bourgeois socialite, bustling with the preparation of a posh dinner gathering, as her son is "in one of his moods." A death, and from proto-Antonioni cocktail party to proto-Antonioni wandering -- distraught Bergman, eaten with guilt, ventures out of her rarified palace into the crowded slums of Rome, a visit to plucky Earth Mama Giuletta Masina and her six children, and a day of real work at the factory weighting in like a prison sentence. Husband Alexander Knox, sympathetic but bemused, begins to wonder: Is his wife falling for Ettore Giannini, the communist intellectual who suggested she work out her grief by meeting the lower classes? Actually, the expansion of Bergman's view is more spiritual than Marxist, but her awakening is, ultimately, more radical than Giannini's lip-service of "class struggle," thus more dangerous. The theme is the anxious search for contemporary sainthood, the Franciscan humility of The Flowers of St. Francis transported to a morally degraded Europe, only to be force-fed into outlets (psychiatry, propaganda, even organized religion) as ill-fitting as Bergman's cosmopolitan frame for housing transcendental yearnings. Yet, behold, for Rossellini's scrutiny of his nervous muse reveals a change cosmic and corporeal, make-up rubbed off and frayed nerves exposed to the surface, sense dawning amid chaos during vigil over a whore (Teresa Pellati) coughing up blood. Baby-faced criminals, arrests, and haunted stares at the insane asylum -- dazed with melodrama yet purefied, the film locates the heroine's newfound freedom behind bars, her soul no longer prisoner to her body, and a sublime close-up, leaning over to sum up Rossellini's spiritually regenerating credo to a bereft fellow inmate: "You are not alone." Cinematography by Aldo Tonti. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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