My impatient self — which rears its ugly head once in a while — almost had no room for Nanni Moretti’s La Stanza del Figlio [The Son’s Room, 2001], and I was ready to strike it away as nothing more than a day-to-day chronicle of an ordinary family man and his psychiatric practice. Day in and day out, you see, Giovannie (played by Moretti himself) goes about a regular routine — running, making time with his family who all seem happy and content with each other (even given the “crisis” engulfing the son and charges of theft of school property), and listening with an objectivity closer to abandon the sad mad tales of his patients, some of whom have lives bordering on the perverse. Then something tragic happens. Moretti has a way for cuing us in into this before we even have a knowledge of that tragedy: a series of visual, snappy foreshadowing — a motorboat’s engine where the son is in suddenly whirrs to life; a man runs frantically away from the wife in a public square; a hand quickly reaches out to the daughter who is riding a motorcycle — and we feel feel that something is terribly, suddenly wrong. Only then did I realize that there was reward for our patience: in the first hour of the film, what we have been doing is immersing ourselves into the intimate lives of the characters, and so when their world is suddenly turned upside down, we feel as if their tragedy is also ours. This is a heart-wrenching film about a family dealing with grief, and it underlines what Roger Ebert once said — that what we feel most in great films are the stories of good people doing good things for others, or at least good people trying to maintain dignity in a cruel world. This is one such film populated by very good people enduring something terrible. There is a sequence near the end that made me smile through my tears: the whole family has just given an impromptu car ride from Italy through Germany to France for people they have just met the night before. It goes unsaid but there is a reason why they make the undertaking — a kind of emotional mending, perhaps. At the end of their road trip, the mother and father find themselves parking in front of a French port city which overlooks the beautiful Mediterranean. Their daughter soon wakes up, and joins them by the breakwater. “Where are we?” she asks. They both just start smiling. “You know, of course, that I have basketball practice later today, right?” she persists. And all three just burst into laughter. And so do we. And we realize that this laughter is the catharsis we need most for this lovely family, and for us as well. 
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My impatient self — which rears its ugly head once in a while — almost had no room for Nanni Moretti’s La Stanza del Figlio [The Son’s Room, 2001], and I was ready to strike it away as nothing more than a day-to-day chronicle of an ordinary family man and his psychiatric practice. Day in and day out, you see, Giovannie (played by Moretti himself) goes about a regular routine — running, making time with his family who all seem happy and content with each other (even given the “crisis” engulfing the son and charges of theft of school property), and listening with an objectivity closer to abandon the sad mad tales of his patients, some of whom have lives bordering on the perverse. Then something tragic happens. Moretti has a way for cuing us in into this before we even have a knowledge of that tragedy: a series of visual, snappy foreshadowing — a motorboat’s engine where the son is in suddenly whirrs to life; a man runs frantically away from the wife in a public square; a hand quickly reaches out to the daughter who is riding a motorcycle — and we feel feel that something is terribly, suddenly wrong. Only then did I realize that there was reward for our patience: in the first hour of the film, what we have been doing is immersing ourselves into the intimate lives of the characters, and so when their world is suddenly turned upside down, we feel as if their tragedy is also ours. This is a heart-wrenching film about a family dealing with grief, and it underlines what Roger Ebert once said — that what we feel most in great films are the stories of good people doing good things for others, or at least good people trying to maintain dignity in a cruel world. This is one such film populated by very good people enduring something terrible. There is a sequence near the end that made me smile through my tears: the whole family has just given an impromptu car ride from Italy through Germany to France for people they have just met the night before. It goes unsaid but there is a reason why they make the undertaking — a kind of emotional mending, perhaps. At the end of their road trip, the mother and father find themselves parking in front of a French port city which overlooks the beautiful Mediterranean. Their daughter soon wakes up, and joins them by the breakwater. “Where are we?” she asks. They both just start smiling. “You know, of course, that I have basketball practice later today, right?” she persists. And all three just burst into laughter. And so do we. And we realize that this laughter is the catharsis we need most for this lovely family, and for us as well.