|
The Son's Room
Directed by Nanni Moretti
Starring: Laura Morante, Nanni Moretti, Jasmine Trinca, Giuseppe Sanfelice
Running Time: 1:35
Country: Italy
Year: 2001
Web: Official Site
|
|
A man runs along the quayside at Ancone one morning. Calm and happy he
returns home to listen to his patients and later on, meet up with his
family. The house is beautiful and full of books, the children are
confident. And then all too easily the son dies in an accident. As if
comfortable, bourgeois life were only a delusion: children can die too,
quickly, without us being there to hold their hand or even cry; children can
die alone.
Guilt and memory run through each of Nanni Moretti's films in a nostalgic
or satirical fashion; from the priest in Mass Is Finished (La Messe Est
Finie) to the semi-repentant communist in Palombella Rossa. So everything
becomes important: the music that Andrea used to like, a red pullover, an
almost long-lost girlfriend, a jog that the father and son did not do
together. But as always with Moretti, the construction is complex and of a
rare aesthetic integrity: making the father a psychoanalyst, a guilt
professional, showing his son playing tennis against an invisible opponent,
a story of a fossil, again an object of memory, none of this is included by
chance. In a beautiful scene that is almost subliminal because it is so
quick the suspicious, almost superstitious Moretti foresees that worse is
never far away: a thief in a market, a truck on the road, unsteadiness on a
scooter, an inflatable boat which is left at sea.
But above all the film finds its charm thanks to the new maturity of Moretti
who takes the risk of admitting that he is happy: it is a great surprise to
see him smile and clap his hands as some Hare Krishna followers pass by or
observe his patients with a new kindness. Of the drama that plays itself
out, which can find neither sense nor an end, we retain the infinite
solitude of grief and the breaking of a man who can no longer listen to
others. In spite of the distressing scenes between the father, the mother
and the daughter, where one must understand and above all speak about death,
perhaps the most sumptuous scenes take place outside the family, as if it is
only possible anyway to capture a small, vile part of the pain onscreen. A
patient who realises that he is the object of resentment and steps aside
discreetly, other people's children that we accompany by car to be sure
nothing happens to them.
|
Corinne Le Dour Zana
Translated by Nick Harrison
 We Have a Pope
|
Copyright ©1998-2017 LA PLUME NOIRE All rights reserved.
|
|
The Son's Room review
