After almost twenty years, you can forget about third parties and start writing on your own. What once looked very naive and easy now looks infinitely soulful and, most importantly, right. Nanny Moretti really found not even the right words, but the right position.
A complete and happy Italian family. Giovanni’s father, the head of the family, is a reasonable and reserved kind man who works as a psychoanalyst and listens daily to his destabilized clients. Paola, a loving wife, and two beloved children: teenagers Andrea and Irene, playing sports and gradually growing up. Scorching Italian sun, coastal roads, morning jogs and no worries. Until the day Andrea dies.
Nanni Moretti doesn’t turn to social dramas, doesn’t get hysterical, doesn’t pour tears into the picture, and doesn’t bring everything to a disastrous end. Tragedy hurting, but until its finale, adhering to the atmosphere of Lordship. All experiences are restrained and occur within the heroes. This is mainly true of Moretti’s character, the psychologist Giovanni, who can no longer work with other people’s souls when his own is damaged. He can not abstract from the thoughts of his son, beating himself, constantly replaying in his head the last moments of meeting him. His solitude in artistic terms is also indicative. He comes to the set with rides, testing his fear and saturating his own nerves. He constantly plays the same melody on the player, trying to akin his own memories to the musical order. To everything that happens on the screen, you feel the kinship necessary for each viewer, because a person experiences exactly the same emotions.
And then you have respect for your father. First of all, for decency, for strong-willed qualities, for the correctness of actions and attitude to life itself. It is unlikely that this picture will surprise anyone and certainly it will not raise a single new question, but when the traditional old saying about “good light films” appears, then first of all it should be applied to this picture by Nanni Moretti. By the way, the owner of the golden palm branch of 2001.
I knew about this movie for a long time, but I decided to watch it only yesterday. The theme itself is heavy, and expectations of how it would be presented in the film were also troubling.
On the one hand, the film is very lifelike, since a similar situation can happen to every family, on the other hand, the angle of view given by the director is a kind of detachment. In part, this echoes the profession of the main character - psychoanalyst. Every day he listens to his patients, their problems, perhaps ridiculous and selfish. He works honestly, tries to help, but he still feels that he is detached from their world, the world of pathologies and far-fetchedness. And now trouble comes into his world. The world, which is shown to be ideal, in terms of relationships: both between spouses and between parents and adolescent children.
And here, the detachment technique used by Nanny Moretti only increases the pain. The hero goes through hopelessness, despair. His attempts to mentally scroll and “take back” life are shown. And all this is as if from the outside, as if at a distance. The family falls into crisis, what seemed to be reliable and perfect on the verge of destruction. On the verge of destruction and its place in the profession.
But after the apocalypse, a small sprout of life, very subtly shown by the director, makes it clear that despite the pain that will remain forever, life will still be revived. What was true will not die.
Swim along the river forward, calmly and without changing its direction.
“Son’s Room” – this film was the first acquaintance with director Nanni Moretti and I do not think that this film will end my interest in his work. Admittedly, I expected a lot from the picture, was ready for the most that would not eat a drama that would not turn my angle of view of the world, but turned it into points of contact. But the output came out different: like there is something in it, but it seems not ...
From the first minutes of the film, I liked that it all starts smoothly, easily. There is no tension, there are ordinary household scenes that do not stand out. It's like watching a primitive family storyless chronicle. And even after Giovanni arrived from his patient on Sunday morning and learned of his son’s death, it’s as if things are still going their normal way. The plot floats along the river forward, calmly and without changing its direction. And at the end of the film, nothing else will be revealed to us except a family humbly bearing their cross of the loss of a loved one.
But when the credits went out, I thought, what if that was life? There is no tragedy, there is no internal conflict - all our fictions and life will definitely correct it, take it with it down the stream like an old abandoned thing. And with Giovanni's patients, it's just a cauldron of problems they've made for themselves, and it's not surprising that some of them are improving at the end of the film. It’s just life, somewhere something goes, somewhere something arrives. I even wanted to compare our lives with ordinary plants that live and do not know about the tragedy, both internal and external, but know how to enjoy the sun, warm and infinitely beautiful. Perhaps this is the whole point of the drama “Son’s Room” to learn to swim along the river forward, calmly and without inventing anything, to learn to enjoy the sun, warm and infinitely beautiful, because our soul does not crave anything more.
My mom hasn't seen, won't watch, and won't watch movies like that.
She is more interested in series on the first and second channels, and biathlon. She also enjoys watching reality shows about transformations and models. I have a wonderful mother, even if not dedicated to quality films, but that is not the main thing.
I was waiting for this film, I didn’t have the Internet, I didn’t even have a computer, I had a channel Culture and a program for a week. I don’t know how I knew that Son’s Room was something I didn’t know I needed to see, but I highlighted it as a newspaper marker and waited for it to be shown on TV. Since we had only one TV for the whole family then, my mother watched "Son's Room" with me.
When the last credits came, my mother cried, quietly, to herself, but bitterly and hard. I also cried, we were afraid to look at each other, because we had to say something, but there was nothing to say.
This is a film about pain, about the loss of the most important thing – your child. I don’t know who I felt more sorry for, a lost family or a boy who died so early. The most interesting thing is that there is no complicated tragic story about a cruel world and cruel people in the film, no one is to blame, just so it happened, such is the fate of this family. And the worst thing is that they have to live with it.
Nanny Moretti did not invent a complex plot, exciting scenes, but simply gave the viewer a life situation that can affect each of us. And this simplicity causes a storm of emotions, each frame seems to be made only to show us once again that Andrea was, he was alive, he was nearby. And then he realizes he's gone.
Not a simple theme for a movie. There is no action, no secrets (except the girlfriend), only emotions. I know a lot of movies about the loss of a loved one, but in them the main character is mortally ill, and almost never shown, so what next? After the death of the hero.
"The Son's Room" just shows what's next.
I think this is Nanni Moretti's best work. Complicated, but at the same time banal (and what is wrong with banality?), sad and touching story of one family. I feel that he is close to this topic, I feel his sincerity.
Of course, “every family is not happy in its own way” and movies like this will always be interesting. “Son’s Room” is something so earthly, personal, barely perceptible, some kind of slight sadness about the inevitability, about life, that it is so fragile.
So it makes sense.
The main stream of films tells about any difficulties, deviations or problems. However, on the fingers of the hand, you can count the pictures in which the viewer would be offered a stable model of a viable family. That’s exactly what Nanny Morreti has to offer. Therefore, despite the outward resemblance to “Ordinary People” of Redford, this film seems to charge the viewer with warmth and confidence.
It all begins like a Hollywood template – difficulties in the family, the accidental tragic loss of a child, the mention of the accidental appearance of a deadly disease in one of the patients. We are reminded of an unfriendly universe. It's like the world wants to hit us, chew us and spit us out. Here I was already preparing for a sweet finale full of touching experiences. But Morrety was pleasantly surprised to reduce everything to the importance of family. Correctly placed accents, which can be seen at the very beginning of the tape, lead us to sad harmony - the current order helps to overcome the tragedy. Well, watching a positive example can not be useless - Morrety's film simply and effortlessly shows how to be happy. Just take a look at the sweet and casual interaction of people by the sea at the very end of the film. Evaluate how carefully and carefully the father approaches his daughter after her disqualification at a responsible match. Simple subtleties of simple relationships. In any case, it won't seem superfluous. Simple, kind and unpretentious movie. Cannes success as an unexpected bonus, confirming the truths carefully preached by the film.
7 out of 10
Nanni Moretti has one very important property, for all the sins and tediousness of his creations, they still believe, or maybe you want to believe. Perhaps due to the hard life of the director himself and his autobiography, his films are never left indifferent. In the “Son’s Room” in a detailed analysis, you can find many disadvantages, but somehow you do not even want to look.
A movie that does not reveal anything new, but makes you miss a story that happened to an unfamiliar family, a story that could happen to anyone. The worst thing is not death, but its consequences for other people. The main character of the picture, impeccably executed by the director, the psychoanalyst involuntarily blames himself for what happened, but tries not to think about the tragedy, to continue living. At the same time, the viewer feels sad and afraid that this could happen to him and his family.
The final is optimistic and beautiful. Heroes understand that life goes on anyway, that now you need to look for some positive moments. The viewer sighs with relief, seeing the correct ending of a complex story. It couldn't have been otherwise.
With all the various forms of social and political background, actively exaggerated in cinematic circles, the decision to give the Cannes branch to a straightforward film about two people experiencing the loss of a child seems almost specific. It is well-known that the festival cinema, as the indigenous representative of the elite league, has the peculiarity of moving away from their own set fashion and gradually returning to it, which the recognition of the “Son’s Room” in one of the largest film screenings of the planet is superfluous confirmation. An unambiguous look at the cracking at the seams of the cell of society made it clear that the family, with its seemingly studied problems, is again in the center of attention: the question of its importance is in the unspoken list of priorities, its internal processes are again interesting. However, the happy wrapper of family life in the era of deformation of universal values does not attract filmmakers. Looking into the keyhole, opening the personal, putting on public display the emotionally fragile aspects of married life in situations divorced from harmony and the concept of happiness – that’s really interesting. To expose the crisis between two people, muted by the presence of common children, where life together is more for them than for each other.
A similar theme in Rabbit Hole was explored nine years later by John Cameron Mitchell and, in my opinion, dealt with it more thoroughly thanks to a balanced scenario that allowed to go beyond narrowly defined space. The scale of The Son's Room is arbitrarily small: the focus is on a particular family at a critical stage of existence - a test of loss that is difficult to accept. Nanni Moretti, who acted as the actor, director and screenwriter of this film, enters with the viewer into an intermittent monologue that lacks assertiveness. Demonstrating abstractly how the mother and father react differently to what happened, he does not make one of the spouses weaker - in the face of common grief, they are weak in equal measure. The difference in behavior: if the state of the mother is grief, turning into shock hysteria, then the father, being the healer of other people's souls, seeks to preserve the remnants of self-control, building a distance as a "safety cushion" with a large number of sharp nails, because inside - the same emptiness, a bottomless vessel of self-flagellation as the only payment for not being near at the time of non-return, did not save and did not inspect. This guilt, mixed with regret, becomes the burden of every day, descending with a hail of mental-physical pain from reminders of who is no longer there. Two family members, helpless and alone, are as far apart as ever. The grip of the emptiness clinging to the soul is not weakened by either the sympathetic views of acquaintances or the presence of a second child. It was for them a meaning - their child - a proof of happiness dulled in a succession of years, an echo of common love and a time when everything was so alive.
For all the subtleties of the process as a state and state as a process in a situation of grief, this film lacks planned multidimensionality - the one to which the director, who took as a basis emotionally reflexive principles, seeks by default. For a full disclosure of the theme of the collapse of two worlds - father and mother, locked in a common loss - the range of scenes presented is unreasonably small, and the set of dialogues is meaningfully scant. There is no progressive emotion that takes captivity, which gives a lump in the throat as one plunges into the mirror of interpersonal alienation, as there is no corresponding depth, the purpose of which is to bring the viewer closer, tire him in the way that an emotionally burdened story tires, where the main thing is not an attraction, but a working space open to new experience. Moretti's film is not rich in eventfulness - it is limited and narrow even within the bounds of the genre's permissiveness. The mental overthinking of possible “ifs”, the search for a child in another person, the fear of losing a connection that has already been lost – all this is here, for 95 minutes in a non-fussy rhythm, clad in a non-screaming pitch, thanks to which the film nourishes the atmosphere of live, but not properly disclosed, human relationships.
6 out of 10
The death of a teenage son during an underwater dive disrupted the quiet life of psychoanalyst Giovanni Sermonti. From now on, the infantile intellectual does not leave a sense of guilt both for that ill-fated day, when he went to his client instead of being in the circle of his family, and for the mediocre life in which so little time was devoted to his son.
Now the healer of other people’s souls, who for many years helped those in need to understand personal problems, himself became irritable and scandalous, and, most importantly, absolutely defenseless against the horror of the loss that occurred. Sermonti became like his patients, because he lost the ability to overcome resentment – on fate in general and specifically on the man he went to that day.
Now, after the tragedy, Sermonti’s professional career and family relationships are in serious crisis. However, Giovanni still finds the strength to get out of a state of prolonged depression.
Moretti is an integral filmmaker who combines the talents of an actor, director and producer, shoots a film of restrained emotions in which lyrical excitement, as a rule, does not reach sensual torment. In the last decade of the twentieth century, it was he who became the unofficial leader of Italian cinema, which experienced not the best times and no longer set the tone in the international rankings table.
But if Moretti’s movie is made with a cold head, it’s not made with a cold heart. Like the director’s previous films, this one appeals to his personal phobias: Moretti had a young son at the time. Overcoming the rationalism of his hero, he parted with his own fears. In 1995, in his film “Dear Diary”, the character got rid of a deadly ailment on the screen (and the author himself – in real life), in “Son’s Room”, the two again confront the horror of death.