|
Newest Reviews: New Movies - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Old Movies - Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 , 2011 , 2012
|
The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti) 2001 2001's inexplicable winner of the Palm D’Or, Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room is a lark. This isn’t entirely surprising, considering the director’s previous films were all comedies (and perhaps it was his well-intentioned foray into serious drama that prompted the prize), but this film doesn’t seem to realize the rules are slightly different when you are attempting to provoke a legitimate emotional response. Instead of showing us the “big” scenes in this story of a family that loses a son, the director opts to use so much restraint that the restraint becomes more of a manipulation than any overtly sentimental scene could ever be. For example, we don’t see any of the family members actually learning that the son has died. We simply see their reaction shots. We don’t see the film’s characters talking with each other about the grieving process, we simply see them as they break down and cry in solitude. The film, which seems concerned in its first half with suggesting we’re eavesdropping on its characters (most scenes show characters as they are interrupted, or shows conversations as another character listens in on it) and seeing inside their closed world drops that motif once the son dies. We get a few private moments, but they are all taken out of context. We are kicked outside of the family’s grief. As a result, none of the performances feels full. For all of the time we have spent with these characters, only the father’s, played by the director, has any level of dimensionality to him at all. The restraint in what is chosen to be shown is only
outmatched by the heavy handedness in how things are shown to us.
The symbolism employed by the film is simplistic. Prior to the son’s
drowning, we see the father sitting before a turbulent sea. When the film’s
faux catharsis occurs, we see the family in front of a serene seascape. The son
drowns in a cave (womb), not lightly suggesting the air of parental guilt that
hangs over the incident. The
father’s biggest scene of mourning is seen as he rides an amusement park ride
that carries him up and down, as he spins without control. At one point, early
on, the family even sings together, “In order to live, you have to die a
little.” It goes on and on with such mind-numbing simplicity and the subtlety
of a brick in the head. Also irksome is the father’s occupation. He is a
psychologist, and his patients we see seem to exist so the audience can giggle
at their problems. The father’s (director’s) condescension toward them makes
the film feel mean-spirited. We are supposed to laugh at these genuinely ill
patients, yet have sympathy when the protagonist suffers from similar mental
problems. In this climate, emotional attachment to the events is completely
impossible. The director heaps on many calculated musical cues just in case,
however. Everything feels like a cheat. The film seems to simplify and restrain
itself past the point where any drama is allowed to form. What is left barely
qualifies as watchable. September, 2001 Jeremy Heilman |