The Son's Room

(a.k.a La stanza del figlio)

The family depicted in "The Son's Room" swells so full of vigorous, attractive happiness in the first section of the film that you find yourself waiting expectantly, almost anxiously, for the tragedy that will shatter it. Writer and director Nanni Moretti plays Giovanni, the head of the idyllic household, an imperturbable psychiatrist treating a roster of generally mildly disordered folk. He has a beautiful, insightful wife, Paola (Laura Morante), who has a job of her own but is never too tired to make blissful love to him. His children, Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice), are attractive and athletic and good-hearted, when you get right down to it, even with the occasional misfortunes of teenagers. They even break into charmingly off-key chorus at one point while riding in the family auto.

So something bad will happen. You actually care, because Moretti and his partners in screenwriting Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef don't paint a picture of a perfect family, just an extremely happy one; each member has faults, deftly captured in the script's various dips into the stream of life. Moretti makes the transitions between scenes abrupt, giving the exposition a mosaic effect that prevents the good feeling from clotting and becoming cloying. The intermittent visits with the patients provide welcome comic relief. But no plot as such develops until conflict arrives: between the family and death, as it happens. The title gives away the epicenter.

Suddenly the family's life appears to us as if it were reflected through a glass darkly, or at least a dark glass: each surviving family member seems to cling to his or her faults in order to endure the unendurable grief that has been thrust upon them. Whatever brio Moretti invested Giovanni with is gone, of course, leaving behind an imperturbability which soon calcifies into stolidness. His daughter, high-spirited before the accident, becomes simply angry, a cauldron of unappeasable desires for revenge and meaning. And his wife is too insightful not to know what's happening to her family, even as she herself cannot escape the effects.

Giovanni is certainly the main character here, unsurprisingly, given the distribution of production duties. Yet in many ways he's also the least admirable, because his struggles are shown in the harshest light. He tries every random thing he can think of to cope; one of the saddest and funniest grieving scenes I've seen in a long time features Giovanni on a ride at a local carnival, in a seat swinging violently up and down, stone-faced with mordant, vacant eyes. He assaults his son's death by gathering knowledge, he tries to banish all reminders of the circumstances, and yet he slips farther and farther away from resolution.

Moretti's performance is gravely desperate and occasionally, true to life, funny because of it. He shows everything without telling - how could he tell? - and his script and direction allow him to do it. It's a performance of everyday suffering, insightful not because Moretti has something new to say but because he says what we all know well enough that we believe it. Morante (who really is beautiful in the classic Italian way) and Trinca make fine foils, both carving out enough space for themselves that their characters stand apart from Giovanni when they need to.

Even as "The Son's Room" drifts farther and father towards hopelessness, it's hard to doubt that the characters will turn some corner or another. By the time solace comes, we may have guessed the means, but their eventual employment will come as a surprise. It's a sweet final touch for a humane, witty, contemplative movie. There's nothing new in the film, but there will never be anything truly new about death; all we can provide are new ways to see it, and we get a good one courtesy of Moretti in "The Son's Room."

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