The Sons Room

Our DVD Price: £15.99 RRP: £19.99 Save £4.00 (20%)   Availability This product should be despatched within 4 days.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 75 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

Psychiatrist Giovanni breaks his promise to go jogging with his teenage son Andrea after receiving an urgent call from a patient. Andrea goes diving instead and tragically dies. This is an acclaimed and sensitive study of how the grief-stricken family come to terms with his death.

Film Information

Technical Details

Film Media

2 Stills

View Stills

1 Trailer

View - Medium (1.70 MB)

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by mike McCahill on 2nd January 2003

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.

View more reviews by mike McCahill

Browse all Film Reviews

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Palme D'Or Winners

Including: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now Redux, Blow-up, Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945), Dancer in The Dark, Elephant, Kagemusha, La Dolce Vita, Marty, MASH.

View all collections

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

Moving films by Keith Costelloe

A list of the films that have an emotional impact and that pack a punch.

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

The Leopard

by Luchino Visconti

Etre et Avoir

by Nicolas Philibert

Bowling For Columbine

by Michael Moore

Fellinis 8 1/2

by Federico Fellini

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

by Michel Gondry

Other films by...

More films directed by Nanni Moretti

Aprile

The Caiman

View more >

More films starring Laura Morante

Remember Me

by Gabriele Muccino

Molière

by Laurent Tirard

Private Fears in Public Places (AKA Coeurs)

by Alain Resnais

Nero

by Paul Marcus

View more >

More films starring Nanni Moretti

Aprile

by Nanni Moretti

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail