By Tom Sime, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – You could call "The Son's Room" a slice of grief. The Italian movie is the latest from Nanni Moretti, whose best-known film in America is probably 1994's "Dear Diary." That movie was about his life as a filmmaker who makes films about and/or starring himself. Though it's not as insular as "Dear Diary," "The Son's Room" continues the self-reflective motif, with Moretti playing the leading character; a psychiatrist in a coastal city whose family and professional lives are nearly demolished by the death of his son. It's a meditative, tender study of sorrow, set at a leisurely pace that lets its more wrenching moments sneak up and grab the viewer.
Giovanni is a bourgeois patriarch with a busy practice, a beautiful wife who runs an art gallery, and a teenage son and daughter. We watch the family going through its various joys and trials, cozy and content with each other. There's a crisis when the boy, Andrea, played by Giuseppe Sanfelice, is accused of stealing a fossil from his science class, but the family absorbs the upset and stays on an even keel.
Then one day, after planning a family outing, Giovanni cancels to pay a house call to one of his patients. While he's gone, his son goes scuba diving with friends, and drowns. The rest of the movie is about how the family copes: Andrea's mother, Paola, played by Laura Morante, isolates herself and broods, obsessing over a love letter from a girl that Andrea receives after his death. Sister Irene, played by Jasmine Trinca, dumps her boyfriend and becomes more and more aggressive with her basketball playing, ultimately starting a fistfight at a game and getting suspended. And Giovanni resumes his practice, but finds his attitude toward his patients changing - particularly toward the man who called him away for that house call on that terrible day.
It looks for a while as if the family can't absorb its grief and may fall apart. But the love letter that causes friction at first ultimately leads to redemption. The movie is even-handed and coolly detached in style; there's not a shred of melodrama, and there are times when you wonder why and where it's going.
But that deliberately leisurely pace opens up opportunities for startling power, as in a scene when Paola opens her son's closet for the first time since his death, and helplessly embraces his clothes. We're no more ready for this than she is, and it's hard to take.
There are some similarities between "The Son's Room" and the American movie "In the Bedroom," another study of how a family copes with the loss of a son. But Moretti's approach to both writing and directing is very different. He studies the fabric of grief more subtly, scanning the sea of human emotion not for tidal waves, but for the common flotsam and jetsam that one falls into unawares.
But though it seems a universal story free of affectation, "The Son's Room" is not for everyone. After a preview screening, one viewer was heard to say, "Explain that movie to me," to anyone who would listen. Then he added, "There's a family, and the son dies, and they have to accept it. What's the story?" Well, if that's not a story, what is?
Tom Sime is staff critic for The Dallas Morning News.