Star Review
This latest Nanni Moretti film opens as a portrait of a well-to-do provincial family, in a wryly amusing style instantly familiar from the director’s previous pictures: dad (Moretti himself) is a psychiatrist whos getting tired of having to deal with his patients’ collective boredom; mum (Laura Morante) works in an art gallery by day but still finds time to come home and bake cakes for her two children. The son, Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice), is a schoolboy with a taste for practical jokes and a curious losing streak in school tennis games which dad is trying to analyse out of him; daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) is the grade-A student, poring over obscure Latin texts with a pot-smoking boyfriend dad has his doubts about. Then, just over a half-hour into the film, something happens, a tragic bolt from the blue. The remaining hour follows what remains of such a close-knit family as they try to pick up the pieces and cope with the extra space that’s opened up around the kitchen!
table.
In comparison with the slightly dubious manner in which grief was manipulated to become a motivating force in the American picture In The Bedroom last year, any emotions felt in The Son’s Room are a lot gentler, but no less keenly felt. Moretti is more interested in the subtle repercussions - the ripples which pass across the water - which arise in the wake of such loss: dad works up a conspiracy around the death, and drifts off during his patients therapy sessions to worry he’s putting clients needs before those of his own family; daughter picks a fight in her next basketball game and gets herself suspended.
As the title suggests, this is a film of private spaces, places of contemplation where one can break down or hide (secrets) from the world: bedrooms, changing rooms, the shrink’s office. Inevitably, the cracks start to reappear in public arenas (the basketball court, a dinner party, a letter written to one of the deceased’s friends) where the protagonists try to share or displace their grief. Only by letting an outsider into those private spaces - getting a different perspective on events - do the family start getting back to some kind of normality, albeit a normality filtered through the relentlessly questioning mind of a psychiatrist.
An elegant, impressively crafted film, The Sons Room manages to be both very funny and terrifically sad within its duration. Time, of course, is always cited as the great healer in situations as desolate and as delicate as this; one might say that ninety-nine minutes in Morettis company would be a fine way to help anybody at least some of the way through the longest and loneliest of nights.
mike McCahill on 2nd January 2003
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The Sons Room 
