The awarding of the Palme d’Or at Cannes to the 2002 French film The Pianist alerted us to the tremendous artistic comeback of Roman Polanski, the one-time remarkable director of “Two Men and a Wardrobe” (1958) and Knife in the Water (1962). The film that won the world’s most prestigious film prize one year earlier was La stanza del figlio—The Son’s Room—by Nanni Moretti. I mention the two in the same breath for more than the identical prize that both men won. Both these artists who—let’s be frank—have many times disappointed us reached deep into the bowels of their being to create the works for which they were thus honored. Each could scarcely have made a more deeply personal piece of work. For The Pianist, Polanski revisited the trauma of a lifetime, his own boyhood escape from the Nazis as the hunted Polish Jew whose adventures would form a partial basis for friend Jerzy Kosinski’s electrifying (and largely autobiographical) novel The Painted Bird. Polanski did this—earlier, he had passed on the opportunity to direct Schindler’s List because he wasn’t ready to turn his eyes back—in order to essay the wartime hiding of another one of the hunted, concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. The seed for Moretti’s co-writing (along with Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef), directing and starring in La stanza del figlio was the trauma he recorded in his earlier Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1994), which Moretti likewise wrote, directed and starred in, on that occasion playing himself. The trauma was this: Moretti had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fortunately for us as well as for him, reports of the Italian artist’s imminent demise proved premature, and subsequent word that he was about to become a father triggered in full his radiant sense of survival and renewal. Art can be wrenchingly ironic. La stanza del figlio, about the death of a son, testifies to Moretti’s sense of newfound life. The connection is there for us to see, however; what more powerfully impresses with the ultimate value of life than its inconceivable loss? And what better way to record this than in a comedy—a comedy of life? By far, La stanza del figlio is Nanni Moretti’s best—and, I swear, funniest—comedy. He has come back from the grave with artistic life and truth such as I never imagined he would attain.
Moretti in this instance (beautifully) plays Giovanni, a middle-aged, middle-class psychologist with a wife and two teenaged children, a daughter and a son, and of course a roster of hilarious patients. (For the record, Nanni Moretti is sometimes credited as “Giovanni Moretti.”) Paola is his wife; Irene, his daughter; Andreà, his son. The family’s essential stability and happiness, proceeding from Giovanni’s relaxed authority at its head, is everywhere perceivable, but one extraordinary scene projects their contentment to the utmost: following Giovanni’s lead, the entire group sings together during a car trip.
Nothing in this film escapes ambiguity, however. In the back seat, the two offspring seem to slide from slight mockery to genuine participation when joining their parents in song. Giovanni seems more attached to his son than to his daughter. Giovanni’s work, because it involves providing professional help to his patients, sometimes interferes with his off-hours home life, to which all the other members have had to adjust. Andreà lies to his father about a school escapade in which he helped “borrow” and accidentally broke a fossil from science class; Andreà lies to his mother also, but he eventually tells her the truth. In the meantime, Giovanni suspects his son of the theft. Andreà worries about disappointing his father, who finds him (unlike his sister) insufficiently competitive in sports. About tennis Giovanni tells Andreà, “You play to win.” Andreà’s response: “No, I don’t.” Indeed, Giovanni is competitive in most everything, and to this aspect in his personality even Paola has had to yield quietly. When they have lost their Andreà, however, the marriage falls apart in part because Paola is no longer willing to pay the emotional duties that marriage to Giovanni seems to require.
In their grief over their son’s absurd death in a diving accident, Giovanni and Paola find every piece and corner of their lives together ransacked and emptied. Theirs is not a loss capable of being compartmentalized; the loss of their son is an abyss into which everything falls, including Giovanni’s capacity to tend to his patients in a competent and professional manner. In retrospect, perhaps it was Andreà who had been the real center of Paola, Giovanni and Irene’s family life.
I have never seen so powerful a film about parental grief, and the miracle, surely, is that Moretti has created a sufficient emotional elasticity so that the film retains its identity as a humanistic comedy; not once is there the slightest collapse into melodrama. (We are not In the Bedroom here.) Be warned, therefore: this film is a heart-battering experience. There isn’t any sentimental outlet to reassure one’s feelings. Moretti wants nothing less than that each audience member should actually experience, however vicariously, the sudden, cruel stroke of loss that the characters experience. We are used to such films generating intense sympathy; I know of no other that generates empathy instead. This film of exquisite finesse, therefore, has its raw side, and depending on how far into the abyss of loss you are not willing to follow the film you may wisely choose to pass the experience by. Moretti’s film provides no “free ride.” In particular, Giovanni’s shafts of memories of his son constitute the most heart-piercing flashbacks in cinema since Akira Kurosawa’s in Ikiru (1952).
What a wonderful comedy of life Moretti this time conjures, with what depth of human spirit and the capacity to endure the most calamitous jerks of circumstance. The opportunity for healing occurs as suddenly, as unexpectedly, as the wounding loss. It comes in the form of a letter to Andreà—a letter from a girl, Arianna, whom his parents knew nothing about. Paola in particular feels obliged to let Arianna know that Andreà is dead. It turns out that Arianna and Andreà had only just met, just once, but Arianna looked forward to seeing him again. Arianna visits; tentatively a couple again, Giovanni and Paola, along with Irene, end up escorting Arianna and a boy with whom she is traveling part of the way on the next leg of their lives’ journey. The film concludes with a shot into which the entire film pours: from Andreà’s vantage in heaven, a survey of father, mother and sister below, all of them distributed in the frame to underscore their potential as family again but, in the meantime, the separateness, the painful isolation, of each. “The son’s room,” it turns out, isn’t Andreà’s bedroom, as we had thought; it’s whatever space the loved ones he has lost now occupy. The final shot suggests that father, mother and sister compose Andreà’s uncompleted poem: a poignant finale.
Everything in this film is gracious and graceful, and nowhere is this more the case than in the note of transcendence and hope on which the film closes. Although the camera is looking simply across at the end, Moretti’s conclusion recalls the heavenward pan, with its intimations of eternity, at the close of Roberto Rossellini’s supreme masterpiece, Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950). In retrospect, the stolen, broken fossil looms as “the family”; we recall the secular nature of Giovanni and Paola’s lives—the fact that they did not even join the Mass at their son’s funeral. Forget about Palombella rossa (1989) and Caro diario. Nanni Moretti, refreshed, is in a different league now.
In addition to winning the Palme d’Or, the film took the best actress prize at Cannes for Laura Morante’s stunning performance as Paola, a role that encompasses every conceivable note of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Morante also won the David di Donatello Award as best actress, and indeed the film took the best film prize. The Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists agreed: La stanza del figlio is the best film of 2001.
Moretti’s finest collaborator here is his color cinematographer, the great Giuseppe Lanci (Bellocchio’s Leap Into the Void and Devil in the Flesh; Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia). This is supernally clear color photography, and it suggests, perhaps, Andreà’s spiritual participation in the mise-en-scène even prior to the departure of the character.
In all manner and fashion, this is a film with a wondrous glow to it. The Son’s Room is a comedy to cleanse the senses.
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Dennis Grunes 