Posted: 03/07/2002

The Son’s Room

(2002)

by Parama Chaudhury

Winner of 2001’s Palm D’Or, The Son’s Room pales in comparison to In the Bedroom.

The inevitable comparison has to be addressed, so let’s get that out of the way first. What is the chance that two high-profile films about a family coping with a son’s unexpected death will turn up in any given year? This was the year of both Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room and Todd Fields’ In the Bedroom, which was unfortunate for both films. Even though much of America will not get to see The Son’s Room, Moretti’s stature as a director and the visual advantages of shooting in Italy will prompt unfavorable comparisons. But to Fields’ credit, after seeing In the Bedroom, it seems clear that the buzz surrounding The Son’s Room and its success at Cannes is mainly due to Moretti’s fame. The Son’s Room is a well-crafted, thoughtful study of emotions, but nevertheless, it fails to inspire in the way that In the Bedroom does.

Moretti himself plays the lead character, Giovanni, a happily-married psychiatrist with two teenage children. The first half of the film is devoted to showing the everyday happiness of this tightly knit family, and in particular, a father’s love for his son. Unfortunately, these pictures seem a little too blissful: it is clear that the only reason for showing us these images is so that they can be contrasted with the grief to come. There is little tension in the early part of the film. The son, Andrea is accused of stealing a fossil from his school’s lab, but his parents don’t seem unduly worried, and are only too ready to believe in their son’s innocence. When a freak accident finally kills Andrea, the family is devastated. But what we have seen of their life earlier is so picture-perfect and unreal, it seems like their grief is also an illusion. We are constantly reminded of how the growing tension between Marisa Tomei’s character and Sissy Spacek’s character in In the Bedroom made the early parts of the movie interesting and not just a run-up to the big killing. Here, Giovanni is wrought with grief, and finds himself unable to give his patients the solace that they expect from him. Yet, the most interesting part of this is the way in which his patients react to their doctor’s personal tragedy.

The best thing about The Son’s Room is in fact, the attention paid to the bit parts. Each one of Giovanni’s patients is a stereotype: the sex-obsessed, the order-obsessed, the self-obsessed, and so on. But the gusto with which the actors play these parts makes each of them real and extremely entertaining. We also connect best to Giovanni as the calm, seen-it-all psychiatrist. In this role, Giovanni is like the director: he watches and listens, and is vastly amused by the pet peeves of his subjects. Unlike with his family, where he seems incredibly sanitized, Moretti is interesting, and almost intriguing in his bare-essentials consulting room.

Towards the end of the movie, Giovanni’s wife, Paola, played by the beautiful Laura Morante, finds a love letter addressed to Andrea. The letter at once is soothing, because it recounts Andrea’s lovable qualities, and heart-wrenching, because it throbs with a love waiting to be lived. Paola suddenly becomes three-dimensional in her despair to contact the girl who wrote the letter and her frustration with her husband who prefers a more cautious approach. This time, In the Bedroom fares badly in comparison, since Spacek’s wide-eyed grief seems put-on next to Morante’s quiet heartbreak. When they finally do get to meet the girl, Arianna, we finally see why Moretti’s fame as a filmmaker is justified. Arianna is hitchhiking to France, and Giovanni and his family end up driving her to the border, rather than just to the nearest rest stop. As the children fall asleep in the back, Giovanni and Paola recapture some of their affection for each other, which was dented and almost irreparably damaged by their loss. As they reach the border, their daughter, Irene, played with fresh-faced charm by Jasmine Trinca, wakes up with a grumpy “Where the hell did you bring me? I have basketball practice tonight!” Wordlessly, seamlessly, the family rebuilds its ties by the seaside, and as they wave good-bye to Arianna, we see that they are an almost-complete family once again. This mature depiction of how people heal after a devastating blow is more perceptive, and therefore more satisfying to the audience, than the denoument in In the Bedroom.

If a lesser director had been associated with this film, it would probably have been judged a fairly good movie, but not a masterpiece, as the Cannes crowd seems to have thought. Some sequences are crafted with an excellence far above anything in In the Bedroom - the various scenes of Giovanni running by the harbor, sometimes contemplative, sometimes at peace, sometimes heartbroken, the parade of patients at Giovanni’s consulting room, the final drive to the French border - but other parts are amazingly stagnant. A quiet movie is one thing, but a flat one is something else, especially when we are talking about the man has the ability to make a sensitive and discerning film like Caro Diario. The bottom line is that The Son’s Room is probably of the same average quality as In the Bedroom, but its quality is less even. And the fact that Fields is a first-time director whereas Moretti is hailed as one of the greats of his generation means that Fields and In the Bedroom have won this round.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer based in New York City.

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