Empty hallways and cracked ashtrays
The Son’s Room tops the recent flood of parental bereavement films
REVIEW
THE SON’S ROOM
Starring Nanni Moretti
Co-written and directed by Nanni Moretti
Opens Friday, March 1
Plaza Theatre
The Son’s Room is an honest reflection of a family fractured by tragedy.
Surprisingly nuanced, the film is co-written and directed by Euro-comedy auteur Nanni Moretti (a.k.a. the "Italian Woody Allen"), who also stars as Giovanni, a character whose average day fits the definition of the good life – he has a successful psychiatric practice, a supportive and loving family, and a beautiful apartment with high ceilings and extended hallways.
Moretti takes his time immersing us in Giovanni’s life, both at home and professionally, layering mundane micro-details until they become rich characterizations. Giovanni still makes surprise visits to his beautiful wife, Paola (Laura Morante), at work, and cheers on his daughter, Irene (Jasmine Trinca), and son, Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice), at their basketball and tennis matches. His psychiatric patients sometimes interest him to the point that he's almost over-involved, and other times bore him to the point of tears.
Initially a gently charming and inconsequential family comedy, the event of Andrea’s fatal diving accident transforms The Son’s Room into a tense, but tender, treatise on the nature of loss, and Moretti creates several affecting sequences that show why the film won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival.
Moretti cross-cuts between the activities of the family members in the moments leading up to Andrea’s accident – Paola wanders an open market, Irene motors about on a scooter, and Giovanni drives out to the country to visit a patient diagnosed with cancer. Having planned to take Andrea out for a morning jog, Giovanni continually replays his decision to accept an appointment on a Sunday.
Immediately after hearing the news, Giovanni wanders into a crowded gymnasium where Irene is mid-game, rushing up the court with the ball. Upon first noticing her father, she smiles, but then quickly realizes something is wrong. She stops dead in her tracks, and a member of the other team easily steals the ball away as the entire movement of the world seems suddenly stalled. While Paolo lays curled up in bed and Irene retreats into her room, Giovanni sits in front of the stereo with a remote, repeatedly scanning the same few bars of a Michael Nyman composition.
At the funeral, Moretti’s camera lingers on the finality inherent in Andrea’s casket – the screws winding into the wood in tight close-up, the soundtrack overwhelmed by their insistent grinding and the buzz of the drill. Upon returning home, Giovanni can’t help but notice the chips in the ashtrays and teapots, the scratches on the countertops. Numb with grief, he heads to a busy amusement park, a cinematic convention given new life under Moretti’s steady hand. Paola heads instead into Andrea’s room, hesitantly flipping through his notebooks and reclining on his bed.
The Son’s Room has a pleasant surprise twist near its end that provides the beginning of closure for Giovanni and his family, and also a difficult acknowledgment that life moves steadily onward. Written following Moretti's own recent cancer scare (the tumor luckily proved benign), his newfound seriousness bears surprisingly high dividends. It’s easy to quibble with Moretti’s occasional lapses into cliché (albeit quickly reversed), and Nicola Piovani’s maudlin score is more befitting of "a very special episode" of Touched by an Angel. But despite its minor flaws, The Son’s Room elevates our participation from sympathetic pity to palpable involvement. It casts an undeniable spell – equal parts inescapable sadness and rekindled hope. |
