A popular Cannes Palme d'Or winner this year, Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room certainly marks an impressive change of direction after the easy going charm of his two best known films, Dear Diary and Aprile. It's a moving, often painfully honest meditation on the effects of the death of a loved one and was precipitated by Moretti's own contemplation of mortality following his reaction to the diagnosis that he was suffering from a non-malignant cancer.
The film focuses on an affluent psychoanalyst, Giovanni (Moretti), living an idyllic, bourgeois existence in a small town in Italy. Genial by nature and besotted with his wife Paola (Laura Morante), Giovanni also dotes on his two children, Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice). Working from the small practice that adjoins his apartment, Giovanni spends his days listening to the various neuroses of his troubled patients, neuroses that are far removed from his own tranquil, untroubled existence. A decision to give up a family Sunday to visit a distant patient brings catastrophic results when Andrea makes fresh plans to go diving with friends only to never return.
Both structurally and thematically The Son's Room is more focused, less scattershot than Moretti's previous works. The witty elliptical asides and playful vignettes are dispensed with (the director is often lazily dubbed an Italian Woody Allen) in favour of a more cohesive narrative about love, loss and the need for personal redemption, which in less assured hands could have played out as a mawkish, overtly sentimental and sermonising family melodrama. Moretti and his co-writers Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef fashion something all together more telling: an authentic, incisive and deeply affecting drama about insurmountable grief and the fragile fabric of life. Anchored by Giuseppe Lanci's delicate, unfussy photography and subtle, suitably nuanced performances by a pitch perfect cast (not least Moretti himself), it's a genuinely affecting experience, charged with both humility and humanity. The film's melancholic but never self-pitying tone is echoed by the evocative use of Brian Eno's By This River, which lends it the feel of a tonal poem. An audacious work from a director with the intellect and the integrity to confound expectations.
Reviewed by Jason Wood
Reader comments about The Son's Room
biljana stojanovic (sbiljana77@yahoo.com) writes:
the film is GREAT ,full of emotions...and it so hard for soul...
and i want to bag you to tell me where i can find the song "by this river" from "the son's room" please?
thank you
Martin (Poland) (Email address withheld) writes:
Hi, maybe I'm a little bit late but the song that You were looking for was Brian Eno's "by this river".I found it by Kazaa. peace!
about the movie: beautiful,deep,touching and with great music by Mr. Piovani.can't stop thinking about this movie after seeing it few months ago
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