Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nanni Moretti's "La stanza del figlio", November 23, 2001
This past summer I saw in Italy Nanni Moretti's most recent film "La stanza del figlio" ("The Son's Room"). It is Moretti's best film, in my view, and without a doubt one of the best I've seen in recent years. Moretti treats with immense sensitivity the subject of the interaction between different members of a family following a tragedy. Even if not to the extent of that in this movie, Moretti touches upon the pain that virtually of us have gone through sometime in our life and how each of us copes with it. He exposes us to our vulnerabilities, our sense of guilt, justified or not, and to the love that we often find difficult to express until it is too late.
Moretti presents characters with whom we can indentify and in so doing we can share their pain, their struggle to overcome it and we can find comfort in their final ability to get on with life. "The Son's Room" is a uniquely beautiful and touching film. It is fully deserving of the of the awards it has received and Italy can be proud for submitting this work as its entry for consideration for the Oscar nomination for this year's best foreign film. This is a movie that must be seen by all loving parents, and their children.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Very little of life is completely under one's control", August 30, 2005
Happiness can be delicate. In just one swoop, it can stolen out from under you, just when you least expect it. The results can be often devastating - some can never recover. The family in the Italian film The Son's Room has found such happiness, but when tragedy suddenly strikes, they're engulfed in a whirlwind of grief and paralyzed with heartache.
Grief is perhaps the most tangled of human emotions, and the vagaries of sadness, love, and anger that comprise its essence are often very difficult to portray. Luckily, co-writer, director, and actor Nanni Moretti avoids all the usual clichés in this delicately nuanced and subtly acted film. The Son's Room is indeed a moving and weighty depiction of one family's attempts to heal after sudden death strikes them.
Moretti stars as Giovanni, a successful psychiatrist with a busy practice treating the assorted neurotics of the picture-perfect Northern Italian coastal town he and his family call home. Giovanni is a mild-mannered and kindly man, who has a sort of passive and submissive approach to living.
Giovanni also has a lovely family: he's happily married to gorgeous book publisher Paola (Laura Morante) and shares what he considers a close relationship with his teenaged daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice).
He presides over his wife and two children with a kind of flaccid authority, enveloping them with the same deceptively passive doctoral concern with which he counsels his psychiatric patients. He supports, and heals, less by what he says than by what he doesn't say. He quietly coaches Andrea in soccer moves, while encouraging Irene to be more competitive at basketball.
Perhaps it's an ominous portent of what is to come, but the film opens as Andrea and his friends have been accused of stealing a valuable fossil from the school's Science department. Giovanni and Paola are surprised to find they entertaining the idea that their son may in fact be guilty as charged. However, no one takes the incident that seriously.
If this is the only drama that affects Giovanni's serene life, nothing prepares him for the sudden tragedy that occurs one sunny Sunday afternoon. Called away from home by a desperate client, Giovanni cancels his plans to go jogging with Andrea; and it's a fatal choice that haunts him for months to come.
The accident, when it happens, is so unexpected. The loss giving rise to sorrow, rage, tenderness, and the inexplicable feeling that hope is no longer possible. The family, emotionally fractured, is unable to continue on. Plunged into unimaginable grief, Giovanni attempts to carry on with his life, but bereft of his objectivity, he finds he's no longer able to function as an analyst.
The Son's Room, with it's subtle acting and its pensive, emotionally layered story, remains a startling testament to the delicate nuances of grief. And it's as though Moretti has invited the viewer to spy on a deeply personal event in the life of a very ordinary family. Like a fly on the wall we witness the sadness, the regret, the empty dinners and the overwhelming feeling of whether they could have done anything to stop the accident.
Moretti, whose eyes glitter with knowledge from within a bland, bearded, professorial face, gives a wonderful performance, as does the classy Morente as the beautiful, anguished Paola. While Giovanni wanders dazed through a theme park, numb to the grief, Paola fields a desire to talk about the absent child.
A savior for the family arrives in a letter addressed to the deceased, and when the writer appears on the family's doorstep, she offers the grace note that reminds them of the means by which happiness eventually repairs itself and the unavoidable fact that life goes on. There's no catharsis here, only a heartfelt exploration of what it means to grieve. Mike Leonard August 05.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Capriciousness of Life, August 10, 2006
Rarely has a film drawn me in so deeply that I remain affected days after I viewed it. "The Son's Room" is profound in its ability to create its moods especially in the latter half of the film. I feel that the director's presentation of this happy family, in the film's first half, is what allowed me to feel the result of an impending tragedy so personally. I kept thinking that I wanted everything to go back to the way it was before. I shared their grief as if it was my own.
I also applaud the presentation of an Italian society which is unlike the comic opera Italian experience presented in American films over the past decades going back to the silent era.
The film may not affect you as deeply as it affected me, but I highly recommend the absorbing story that is presented.
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