Review: Life goes on in ‘Son’s Room’

Geoff Carter

Friday, May 3, 2002 | 10:06 a.m.

"Son's Room"

Grade: *** 1/2

Starring: Nanni Moretti, Laura Morante, Sofia Vigliar and Guiseppe Sanfelice.

Screenplay: Nanni Moretti, Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef.

Director: Nanni Moretti.

Rated: R for language and some sexuality.

Running time: 87 minutes.

Movie times: http://www.vegas.com/movies/

"The Son's Room," an Italian film about a tragic death and a family's reaction, begins with a theft. We don't see the theft, only its aftermath: A school headmaster calls in Giovanni (writer/director Nanni Moretti) to tell him that his son, Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice), is suspected of stealing a fossil from a locked cabinet.

"I don't even know what an ammonite looks like," Giovanni complains to his wife, Paola (Laura Morante). She tells him it looks similar to a spiral, and that's pretty much the end of the crisis. The family is too content to care if Andrea really stole the ammonite, and by the time Andrea confesses the crime to his mother, it is all but forgotten.

Moretti takes pains to make the family normal, and succeeds: Giovanni's clan is so tightly knit and so utterly unaffected that you never once question their bonds or state of mind. Giovanni is a bit bored by his job as a psychoanalyst, but that's the extent of his woes. The family is happy enough to sing in the car on day trips, and it doesn't take us long to become part of their idyll.

No sooner than everyone's settled does Andrea die in a diving accident, and "The Son's Room" becomes a profoundly touching study in grief. We watch the surviving family stumble through their grieving at varying pace and see their smallest faults -- faults we scarcely recognize from the film's first act -- magnified into full-blown obsessions.

Giovanni's boredom becomes an impatience with fate, and a feverish desire to turn back time. Daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) becomes violent during a school basketball game. And Paola tries to put Andrea to rest by contacting his ex- girlfriend, Arianna (Sofia Viglar). They're all headed for the same place, and hit the same obstacles; Moretti doesn't give them any shortcuts. As a result, when redemption comes, it feels as real as the loss.

"The Son's Room" is about a death, but it's far from being a eulogy. When it lives, it really lives, and the moments I took away from it were all positive: Giovanni humming along with the Hare Krishna as if he's just heard a hit song, Paola smiling her way through an all-night drive like a teenager. What Moretti has to say about life is pure and honest, and we are the better for having shared it with him and his "family."