Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
The Son’s Room (2001), directed by Nanni Moretti, is an intensely moving depiction of the shattering effect that loss can exert on the fragile veneer of daily living. Ultimately up-lifting, this film first squeezes you through an emotional wringer. This Italian independent film has its own unique style and flair.
Historical Background: Italian director Nanni Moretti was born in 1953 in Brunico, a town in Bolzano Province in Italy. When Moretti turned twenty he purchased a Super-8 camera and began shooting films with his friends as the cast. Four years later, he parlayed that experience into his aptly-named first feature film, Lo Sono un Autarochio (“I Am Self Sufficient”) (1977). It acquired something of a cult following in his native country. His next film, Ecce Bombo (1978), was nominated for a Golden Palm at Cannes. He followed that success with Sweet Dreams (1981), Sweet Body of Bianca (1983), and The Mass Is Ended (1985). During this time period, it was popular to refer to Moretti as the “Italian Woody Allen” because he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in his own films and many featured autobiographical elements. In the 1990’s, he produced Red Wood Pigeon (1990), The Thing (1990), Caro Diario (1994), The Opening Day of Close-Up (1996), and April (1998). In 2001, he produced his most successful film to date, The Son’s Room, which walked away with the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for that year. This film did not, however, receive so much as a nomination for the Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category. Moretti is an especially private person and rarely speaks or appears in public. He epitomizes the independent filmmaker and has a unique perspective that he imparts to his work, along with a delicate comedic touch.
The Story: The first thirty-five minutes of the film is devoted to introducing us to the main characters and establishing that they are an unusually well-adjusted, intelligent, mutually supportive, and happy family. It is a family of four: Giovanni (Nanni Moretti), who is the father and a psychiatrist by profession; his charming, intelligent and beaming wife Paola (Laura Morante); carefree, easy-going teenage son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice); and teenage daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca), who is warm, intelligent, and athletic. Despite the fact that both parents work, they find time to help their children with their schoolwork and talk to them about what’s happening in their lives. When Andrea is accused of stealing a fossil from the science lab at school, his parents stick by him and see the problem through to a conclusion. Ultimately, Andrea admits to his mother that he did take the fossil but as a joke – to upset the teacher. The fossil was later accidentally damaged, compounding the problem. This is also a family that sings together while traveling in the car. Father and son go jogging together and the parents attend their son’s tennis matches and their daughter’s basketball games. The familial relationships here are the embodiment of good communications and unconditional love.
We also see a great deal of Giovanni at work, listening to the various psychiatric problems of his patients. He maintains a calm nonjudgmental demeanor as he deals with a woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a man who is suicidal, a woman who berates him about his inadequacy as a therapist and who indulges in a shopping binge after each therapy session, a man who believes that Giovanni isn’t intelligent enough to be his therapist, and a sexual deviant.
One Saturday morning as the family breakfasts together, the plans of the father and son to go jogging together are disrupted by a call from the suicidal client, who is in immediate need of help. Giovanni agrees to drive to the man’s home to see him right away. The four members of the family head off in their separate directions. Paola heads to the market, Irene goes riding with her friends on mopeds, while Andrea heads off on a scuba diving excursion with some buddies. This will be the day, however, when the idyllic life of this perfect family will come crashing down around them. When Giovanni returns, he discovers that Andrea has died in a tragic diving accident. The rest of this film is devoted to the issue of grief as it relates to the three surviving members of this family.
The pain of all three is palpable. They struggle their way through the wake, suffering their goodbyes to Andrea, and stoically observe the lid of the coffin being sealed with solder and a blowtorch followed by a pneumatic screwdriver. Their grieving continues at home, as they confront the empty spaces that used to be occupied by Andrea. Paola weeps, Giovanni broods, Irene tries to raise her parents spirits by making them breakfast in bed. They write notes to those who came to the funeral, Giovanni and Paola snap at one another, and Giovanni sleeps on the couch. Irene breaks up with her boyfriend because she frets that he may feel obliged to stick with her. Giovanni looses his clinical objectivity, becoming disinterested in some patients and too emotionally involved with others. Irene blows up during a crucial basketball game and earns a multi-game suspension. Giovanni, wracked with guilt, obsesses over how that tragic day’s scenario could have been altered to prevent the tragedy from happening.
One day shortly after Andrea’s death, Paola discovers a letter in the mail addressed to him. Reading it, she discovers that it is from a girl named Arianna (Sofia Vigliar) and that she was Andrea’s girlfriend. The two had met a few weeks before the accident while Andrea was on a field trip and he had kept the relationship secret. Paola is struck by Arianna’s genuine insight and understanding into Andrea’s nature. She shares the letter with her husband and insists that he write her and apprise her of Andrea’s death. Later, she informs her husband that she would like to meet Arianna. Giovanni several times tries to begin a letter to Arianna but is unable to complete it. Paola, growing impatient with her husband’s incapacitating grief, impulsively calls Arianna on the phone and tells her the bad news. She tells the girl that she would like to meet her but Arianna is too dumbfounded to respond. Paola asks her to think it over.
Giovanni decides that he is no longer effective as a therapist and decides to make a professional change, which does not sit well with his clients. Later, Giovanni takes a trip to a record store that his son used to frequent, asking the salesman, who knew his son, for advice on a CD that his son might have liked. The man recommends a Brian Eno recording.
Arianna pays a surprise visit to the family. Initially only Giovanni is at home. He grants Arianna’s request to visit Andrea’s room, of which Andrea had already sent her snapshots. When Paola returns home, she is so emotionally overcome upon learning about their guest that she initially wants to flee without meeting the girl. After bracing herself, however, she greets and embraces her son’s last and, perhaps, only girlfriend. After visiting for a while, Paola invites Arianna to stay, but she informs them that she has a friend waiting for her outside and that they are hitchhiking their way to France. She acknowledges that her mother is worried about the excursion and that she has had to promise to call each evening. Paola and Giovanni offer to drive Arianna and her friend to a rest area on the highway where they will be able to find a ride. Irene goes along as well.
Arianna’s traveling companion turns out to be a guy, which is another tough bit of psychic adjustment for Andrea’s parents, since this boy now occupies, in a sense, their son’s former position in relation to Arianna. Arianna and her new boyfriend have no luck finding a ride at the first rest area. Giovanni and Paola, who have waited to see them off successfully, offer to take them further to a larger rest area. Soon, however, the youngsters have dozed off in the back and Giovanni decides to keep going and deliver them to the French border. Seeing Arianna and her boyfriend reminds them that life goes on and has a healing effect on their psyches. It helps that the young man is a decent kind of guy as well. As they arrive at the French border, it is dawn, and the sun rises over the Mediterranean. As Arianna and her friend make their way on alone, Giovanni, Paola, and Irene stand looking out over the ocean that took Andrea from them, while the strains of the Brian Eno song “By This River” are heard from their car’s CD player: “Here we are stuck by this river, you and I underneath a sky that’s ever falling down, down, down.” The threesome has found enough catharsis in this road trip that the healing process has begun and we can rest assured that they will be o.k.
Themes: The central theme of this film is grief and how we deal with it or fail to deal with it. This is no cheap melodramatic handling of the issue, however, but a sensitive and intelligent illumination. Ever person, every family suffers grief, usually repeatedly, but there is no grief more difficult than that which comes from the premature loss of one’s child. We cope more easily with the death of older persons or even the middle aged, but the loss of a child, adolescent, or young adult is unexpected and, seemingly, unfair. We feel cheated because the person’s future seemed so full of hope and potential. Moretti very nicely illustrates that each person’s experience with grief is different. When we fail at managing our grief, each of us can fail in a different way. Some become angry and irritable, some weep, some become depressed, some are burdened with guilt. Moretti also accurately portrays that there are no quick resolutions to severe grief. Healing takes time and sometimes we have to heal repeatedly before the psychic recovery sticks. Moretti also demonstrates in this film that our capacity to help others with their problems hinges on our own emotional reserves. The distraught Giovanni is no longer able to empathize with his patient’s problems. Where he once listened dispassionately, he now oscillates between hostility, disinterest, and excess emotionality.
One disappointing element of this film is that it resorts to an external and fortuitous resolution to this family’s problem with grieving. It is Arianna’s serendipitous arrival and the road trip that provide the bridge between past and future rather than a conduit built by their own initiative. This significantly weakens the value of the film as a “lesson” for viewers in how to deal with their own grieving experiences – which nearly all of us will ultimately confront. The fortuitous event is effective as a plot device, providing a “twist” and a “surprise”, but greatly reduces the potential value of the message.
A second interesting theme is that life is unpredictable no matter how well we try to manage it or how much effort we put into doing it “right.” Giovanni strives to be the best person he can be. He works hard, spends quality time with his family, keeps himself in tip-top shape mentally and physically. He could be a poster boy for an “ideal man” contest. Nevertheless, one foul breeze, one chance event, brings the edifice of his life crashing down. Moretti sets up this notion of unpredictability subtly but brilliantly. The four members of the family have gone their separate ways in the morning. As Giovanni is driving to see his distraught client, he is passed by a truck that is speeding recklessly. For just a moment, his life is in jeopardy. Irene, riding mopeds with her friends, frolics dangerously with them. They shove one another a bit and lash out with their feet. It is all in jest but nevertheless dangerous behavior. Irene could have been killed. At the market, a purse-snatcher races by Paola, brushing her as he passes. Change the scenario just a bit, and Paola could be lying dead, shot or stabbed. Only Andrea’s day seems to be proceeding in an orderly, uneventful manner. Tragic deaths strike with such seeming randomness.
There is a third theme which, though less developed, I rate as the most useful one in this film, in that it is one which viewers can apply to enhance their own lives. Although the elements of love and effective communication that we see in this family during the first half-hour of the film did not spare this family from dysfunctional grieving, this family nevertheless benefited in the end from all of its strengths. They held together while the grieving process worked itself through to healing. I was particularly impressed when Irene took steps to care for her parents in their hour of need. It’s a role-reversal in a way but it’s really closer to role modeling. Where did Irene learn to be caring in that way? She learned it from observing the care given to herself by her parents. When parents love and communicate effectively with their children, they not only care for their children as good parents should, but they also teach those children how to manifest caring behavior themselves. Later in life, Irene will be a better parent for having had excellent parents. What parents give to their children by way of love also, in most instances, reverberates onto the next generation, and the one after that, and the one after that. Unfortunately, abuse and neglect that parents sometimes heap on their children also typically gets transmitted to additional generations.
Production Values: The script for this film is marvelously restrained – no histrionics or blatant tugging of the heart strings. There is careful attention to the details of everyday life that gives this film the feel of authenticity. The narrative is carried mostly through dialog, which puts a bit of a strain on non-Italian-speaking viewers to keep up with a fairly rapid progression of subtitles.
The comic relief for this otherwise emotionally draining story is provided by the psychiatric patients. This film eschews any serious look at mental illnesses in favor of poking fun at the variety of neuroses that afflict us collectively. While the main story is strongly grounded in realism, the portions in Giovanni’s office are overdrawn to the point of caricature. It works so long as it is understood by viewers as comedy. This film should not be viewed as a documentary on effective psychiatric counseling.
The cinematography and camera positioning of this film is nothing exceptional but is effective enough. There are a lot of static shots. There is little use of either extreme close-ups or long distance shots, crane shots or extensive tracking. In the first half-hour, this approach helps to emphasize the groundedness of this exceptional family. Moretti also pays close attention to the placement of the characters in relation to one another. Before the tragedy, the family members are positioned close to one another and there is a lot of physical contact. After the tragedy, the three remaining family members are more physically separated from one another as well as emotionally.
The casting for this film was very solid. These were demanding parts that ranged from the rosy dispositions of the opening segment to wounded psyches for the remainder of the film. Other than his own films, Moretti has appeared as an actor in Padre Padroni (1977), which I will be reviewing in the near future. None of the others in the cast have other credits in top-quality films.
Bottom-Line: There is so little negative to say about this film that I’ve had to do some soul-searching as to why I nevertheless can’t give it a five-star rating. It does everything it does pretty well but it is not an especially ambitious film. The cinematography, though effective, is a bit pedestrian and the script would have been stronger if it were a better object lesson in how to deal with grief. Still, it establishes a very nice tone and avoids cheap tricks in dealing with the all too frequently manipulated and melodramatic theme of tragic loss. I give it a solid four-stars. The only extra on the Miramax DVD is the theatrical trailer and a listing of the chapters. There’s an optional French language track and optional English subtitles.
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