Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10947 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-01-27
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Italian, Latin
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Son's Room, which picked up the 2001 Palme d'Or at Cannes, marks a departure for writer-director Nanni Moretti. The films that made his name outside Italy, Dear Diary and Aprile, were both highly personal and politicised semi-documentaries, and a strong political sense underlies the half-dozen or so features he made before them. By contrast, The Son's Room is a subtle, intense study of a family cracking apart under the impact of grief, with no overt political element. For all that, it's the most moving film that Moretti's yet made. "It captured me" he says "more than any other [story] I'd worked on previously. It's a film in which the director shares his emotions with the audience, without imposing his own feelings."

As usual, the director plays his own lead character. Here he's Giovanni, a successful psychiatrist in a provincial Italian city (Ancona on the Adriatic coast). He has a beautiful wife, happy in her own career, and two bright, good-looking teenage children, a son and a daughter. Then, out of nowhere, tragedy strikes and in its aftermath, the fissures begin to show in the idyllic façade. Giovanni in particular reveals the insecurities and neuroses lurking behind his tolerant, easy-going demeanour. Moretti homes in on his characters with clear-eyed compassion, never milking the tragedy for facile sentiment but sparing us nothing of the gut-wrenching grief they feel. Nor does he succumb to the temptation of a feel-good happy ending: we are left with a hint of hope for the future, but no more. This is intelligent, mature filmmaking that respects its audience.

On the DVD: The Son's Room comes to disc with just the trailer--and the flabby US trailer at that. A commentary from Moretti would have been more than welcome. Still, the transfer, in the original 1.66:1 ratio, is impeccable, with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound to match. --Philip Kemp

Special Features
Italian
Region 2
English

Synopsis
Nanni Moretti's extraordinary drama THE SON'S ROOM, which won the Palme D'Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, tells the harrowing story of a once tight-knit, happy family having to come to terms with a devastating loss and get on with their lives. Nanni Moretti, the writer-director of the charming CARO DIARIO, which was based on his own life, has created this piece of fiction from scratch, but he nails it so well it is hard to believe it is not a documentary. Moretti, who not only stars in and directs the film but is also cowriter and coproducer, plays Giovanni, a happily married man with two wonderful children; he is also a psychoanalyst with a group of patients both hysterical and sad. He enjoys running through the streets of Ancona, but when he opts to make a rare house call one Sunday morning instead of going for a run with his son, tragedy strikes, and he can't help blaming himself and his choices. He starts having trouble listening to and caring about his patients, and he also distances himself from his wife, played magnificently by Laura Morante. One of the underlying themes of the film is the need to make--and break--scheduled appointments that threaten to overtake one's life with its potential for compulsive obsession; as Giovanni dreams of past scenes playing out differently, he can't help but think that if he had rearranged his schedule based on the importance and necessity of his appointments, his idyllic world might not have been turned upside down.

Customer Reviews

Truly Touching
The most important thing about The Son’s Room is its emotional truth. By avoiding sentimentality Nannie Moretti has crafted an honest film about a family’s grief which completely deserved to win the Palmes Dor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Although fiction, the film begins very much in the same vein as his autobiographical films Dear Diary and Aprile; the humour is gentle and true to life, which makes the accidental death of the family’s son even more devastating.

The scenes of grief are never overplayed, obvious or manipulative and what strikes you the most is how the internalised feelings of the characters are counterpointed with how they try to carry on their everyday lives.

Moretti shows great flair as a director, drawing natural performance from his cast and has a tight and unfussy style which complements the actors and delicately emphasises the changing moods throughout the story.

One of the real coups of the film is the visualisation of the father’s thoughts of how the accident could have been avoided, a series of “what if..” fantasies which I cannot recall ever having seen done in a film before.

There a couple of moments of obvious metaphor – for example when Moretti’s character raves on about how everything in their house is chipped or broken – but they are few and far between. However, the majority of the film sustains a delicate study of the subject that puts overhyped & cliched rubbish like In the Bedroom to shame.

The ending is wonderfully subtle in reaching the only form of resolution there can be.

A truly touching film.

A beautifully morbid film
I was taken a back the first time I saw this film, I did not know that so much emotion could be put into 95 minutes of film. The content of The Son's Room is brutal yet beautiful, it shows the true emotion that goes along with the loss of a loved one, rather then a rose tinted hollywood perception. This film is stunning, emotive and truly one of a kind, a masterpiece by a wonderful writer and director. It is a film that will keep you gripped, it will make you smile, and more importantly it will make you cry on several occassions, surely this shows the genius of the film if it can bring so many emotions to the surface.

A perceptive, beautiful film
This is a superb, moving film that is strongly recommended. Nanni Moretti has spoken in interviews of how he felt a great need to make it: to look at what life is like after the death of a loved one, to consider how grief can separate rather than unite the bereaved. There is much warmth within the film, too: Giovanni and Paola and their teenage children Irene and Andrea enjoy being together, and the early scenes of the family before their tragic loss are marvellous for the believable and realistic way in which a happy family is portrayed.

Ancona, a town in central Italy by the Adriatic Sea, is lovingly photographed by Giuseppe Lanci. Most of the action takes place here, in the family's attractive home and the adjoining consulting room of Giovanni, a psychoanalyst. The settings are nearly always full of sunlight, subtly emphasizing the fact that Giovanni, Paola and Irene can clearly see the finality of Andrea's death, they have no religious beliefs from which they can draw comfort. Moretti has said that he 'wanted this film to be true', and it is: Moretti felt that many film directors, particularly in Italy, avoided really facing the subject of death by approaching it in a comic or grotesque way ('characters dancing a kind of tarantella around the corpse...mobile phones ringing, relatives bickering'). For Moretti and Giovanni and his family, death is as Tom Stoppard described it in 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead': not 'romantic, and not a game that will soon be over' but 'the endless time of never coming back'.

Moretti and his exceptional cast (especially Laura Morante as Paola, and Jasmine Trinca as Irene) sensitively convey the despair, rage and emptiness which follows Andrea's slightly mysterious death. Yet, the film is not depressing, and there are many lines which will make you smile, especially those spoken by some of Giovanni's patients, who cheer themselves up after their psychoanalysis by buying clothes from the surrounding shops ('I should tell my cousin to open a shop here').

Like Nanni Moretti himself, who is an actor, writer, director, producer and film exhibitor (he owns the Nuovo Sacher cinema in Rome, which shows independent productions by filmmakers such as Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami - and which is named after his favourite cake) the film is both serious and good-humoured. 'We can't control our lives completely,' Giovanni says to a patient near the beginning of the film, 'we do what we can'. This refreshingly honest study of a family doing what they can in terrible circumstances is a very memorable, subtle film (with an ingenious final act) which leaves an impression of laughter and love as strong as the pain of separation.