The Son's Room [DVD] [2002]

Although fiction, the film begins very much in the same vein as his autobiographical films Dear Diary and Aprile; the humour is gentle and true to life, which makes the accidental death of the family’s son even more devastating.

The scenes of grief are never overplayed, obvious or manipulative and what strikes you the most is how the internalised feelings of the characters are counterpointed with how they try to carry on their everyday lives.

Moretti shows great flair as a director, drawing natural performance from his cast and has a tight and unfussy style which complements the actors and delicately emphasises the changing moods throughout the story.

One of the real coups of the film is the visualisation of the father’s thoughts of how the accident could have been avoided, a series of “what if..” fantasies which I cannot recall ever having seen done in a film before.

There a couple of moments of obvious metaphor – for example when Moretti’s character raves on about how everything in their house is chipped or broken – but they are few and far between. However, the majority of the film sustains a delicate study of the subject that puts overhyped & cliched rubbish like In the Bedroom to shame.

The ending is wonderfully subtle in reaching the only form of resolution there can be.

A truly touching film.

Ancona, a town in central Italy by the Adriatic Sea, is lovingly photographed by Giuseppe Lanci. Most of the action takes place here, in the family's attractive home and the adjoining consulting room of Giovanni, a psychoanalyst. The settings are nearly always full of sunlight, subtly emphasizing the fact that Giovanni, Paola and Irene can clearly see the finality of Andrea's death, they have no religious beliefs from which they can draw comfort. Moretti has said that he 'wanted this film to be true', and it is: Moretti felt that many film directors, particularly in Italy, avoided really facing the subject of death by approaching it in a comic or grotesque way ('characters dancing a kind of tarantella around the corpse...mobile phones ringing, relatives bickering'). For Moretti and Giovanni and his family, death is as Tom Stoppard described it in 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead': not 'romantic, and not a game that will soon be over' but 'the endless time of never coming back'.

Moretti and his exceptional cast (especially Laura Morante as Paola, and Jasmine Trinca as Irene) sensitively convey the despair, rage and emptiness which follows Andrea's slightly mysterious death. Yet, the film is not depressing, and there are many lines which will make you smile, especially those spoken by some of Giovanni's patients, who cheer themselves up after their psychoanalysis by buying clothes from the surrounding shops ('I should tell my cousin to open a shop here').

Like Nanni Moretti himself, who is an actor, writer, director, producer and film exhibitor (he owns the Nuovo Sacher cinema in Rome, which shows independent productions by filmmakers such as Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami - and which is named after his favourite cake) the film is both serious and good-humoured. 'We can't control our lives completely,' Giovanni says to a patient near the beginning of the film, 'we do what we can'. This refreshingly honest study of a family doing what they can in terrible circumstances is a very memorable, subtle film (with an ingenious final act) which leaves an impression of laughter and love as strong as the pain of separation.