The Son's Room

(La stanza del figlio, Nanni Moretti, Italy, 2001)

1. Review (2003)
Alongside such distinguished dramas as Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1998) and Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room is another film that tackles the difficult subject of a child’s tragic death and its consequent devastating effects on remaining family members.

Moretti – after twenty years of unusual, hybrid work – raised suspicion when he chose this as his first foray into mainstream drama. Was it a bid for cultural respectability?

Happily, the film rises far above such kneejerk reactions. Although a death is at its centre, grieving – and the difficult matter of getting beyond grieving – is its true subject. Moretti’s master stroke is to make the family’s father (played by the director) a psychotherapist. It is in the interactions – some hilarious, some shocking – between Moretti and his patients that we grasp the film’s complex, empathetic understanding of human behaviour.

After his brush with mortality, the therapist finds that he can no longer dispense advice, no longer make love, no longer even sing to himself in mindless joy.

The Son’s Room offers a moving study of how this man and those around him slowly revitalise themselves and return to the Eden of everyday life.

2. Broken Rhythm (2016)
A water polo celebrity who freezes inexplicably before firing between the goal posts (Palombella rossa, 1989). A newly elected Pope who finds himself unable to address the faithful masses from the Vatican balcony, and instead furtively flees into the streets (Habemus Papam, 2011). A film director who can no longer hold it together on set, as her mother lays dying in hospital (Mia madre, 2015) …

Nanni’s Moretti’s films often address urgent issues of personal blockage, panic, fear, grief, and especially life-sapping depression – always within the ever-widening, intersubjective circles of family, work, community, and society.

His wisdom recalls that of the militant psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, who commented in the 1970s that genuine political change will only occur “from the moment when we no longer consider that the problems of fatigue, neurosis, delirium are only minor problems”.

Sometimes dismissed – especially in this latter part of his career – as telemovie-style, bourgeois talkfests, Moretti’s movies reveal their true soul below the immediate, surface level of character speech and interaction. His is a cinema of physical gestures, whether performed in flailing confusion, or in redemptive grace. And these gestures take place within what the sociologist Henri Lefebvre termed a rhythmanalysis of daily life: its routines and rituals, its flows and eddies.

The drama, as well as the comedy, in Moretti’s films comes from a sudden breaking or freezing of this daily flow. It is this deeper level of gesture and rhythm, in both the image and sound design, that Cristina Álvarez López and I attend to in our audiovisual essay Broken Rhythm devoted to The Son’s Room, available for purchase as part of the second volume of The Audiovisual Essay Collection of our work.

The great Mexican poet-essayist Octavio Paz once mused on how each person “is born several times and dies several times”. Paz sought, in all the art he loved, “the story of a resurrection” – what it means, and how it feels, to return to the Eden of everyday life after a necessarily dark episode or period.

When Moretti’s central characters drive or kick a ball, when they dance or hum a tune, even when they simply drink a glass of water as in the immortal conclusion of Caro diario (1994), they are slowly finding their way back to this vital resurrection.

MORE Moretti: A Brighter Tomorrow

© Adrian Martin April 2003 / Cristina Álvarez López & AM May 2016