THE SON’S ROOM (La stanza del figlio) A
Italy France (99 mi)
2001 d: Nanni Moretti
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, this is a gentle, humane, and brilliantly written film about one
family’s reflections on grief and loss, set up initially with simple glimpses
into a warm family environment where the two kids and parents are not afraid to
speak to one another, and, they genuinely like each other. Moretti himself plays a psychologist, and one
by one, brief vignettes of his patients are revealed, and at least initially
this provides comic relief, contrasted against a healthy and sexually
satisfying marriage, featuring the lovely Laura Morante as his wife. But then the son has a tragic sea-diving
accident and each family member becomes paralyzed with grief over his
loss.
Perhaps the most dramatic scene in the entire film is
Moretti going to his daughter’s high school basketball game, his daughter Irene
(arguably the best performance in the film by Jasmine Trinca) is dribbling the
ball and sees her father on the sidelines, not yet knowing about the accident,
and beams a happy smile at him, but when she sees the seriousness on her
father’s face, she freezes, giving him the most haunted expression of pain in
the film, and another girl steals the ball from her. Mind you, he hasn’t told her anything, but
their closeness is revealed in how much she instantly knew just by looking in
her father’s face, and the expression on her face is unforgettable.
Later, Moretti is listening to music, which reminds him of
shared moments with his son, and he repeats the same brief musical refrain
again and again, as if he was trying to control or program his memory while the
camera finds the faces of each family member listening. Each of them subsequently have moments of inconsolable
pain which they suffer alone, they break down uncontrollably, then try to
regain their composure, and these brief portraits of pain speak volumes about
what this film has to say, as they are among the most intensely passionate
moments you’ll experience in a film, at times accompanied by a lilting piano theme
by Nicola Piovani. Surprisingly, the
power of these scenes is how short they are, little bursts of emotion, where nothing
is played out, and the scene moves on.
Moretti’s patients begin to fill him with the depth of his
own human vulnerability, and he stands on the same outer emotional edges for
awhile. His wife finds a love letter
written to her son from a girl none of them have ever met, where she
immediately marches into her son’s room just to feel again his overwhelming
presence. There are moments (repeated
psychiatric sessions) that may not always work in this film, but they are
dwarfed by the power of the ones that do, especially a killer ending that works
through poetic understatement, the beautiful use of Brian Eno’s song, "By
This River," By this
river (Brian Eno) - La stanza del figlio (Nanni Moretti ... YouTube (2:56),
and the assuredness of Moretti’s direction.
In the end, this is a carefully constructed, transforming film, all too
human, heartfelt and affirming.
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