The Son's Room

It has been quite a while I have touched my blog. But I noticed from the count on the webcounter on my blog that still some visitors do visit my blog. So here I go again .....

Today I watched the Italian Movie 'The Son's Room'. The film is produced and directed by Nanni Moretti. THE SON'S ROOM won the Palme D'Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. The film moved me emotionally and had my tear glands ready to overflow. The movie can be compared to Padmarajan's ' Moonampakkam', and Mahesh Bhatt's 'Saransh'.

Moretti, plays Giovanni, a psychoanalyst and has a group of patients who are sad and hysterical. His beautiful wife Paola (played brilliantly by Laura Morante) works in an art publishing house and is the mother of two teenage children, Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice) and Irene (Jasmine Trinca).

The film starts by showing this calm, healthy and happy family, who enjoys the dinner together, enjoy the music together, the father and son go for jogging together. In between we see Giovanni's interaction with different patients. He listens to his patients very calmly and uninterested. We feel that Giovanni is more interested in his family than listening to his patients.

The tragedy strikes when one day Giovanni has to change his plan of going with son for jogging and instead has to attend to one of his patient. The son goes for scuba diving and gets killed in an accident. The family is pushed to the death zone. Giovanni, along with grief, struggles with some guilt because he canceled a run with his son to go on an appointment to patient. He also tries to find out the reason for his son's death, fault in the equipment for scuba diving, but it doesn't give him any comfort from the encompassing grief. Giovanni is consumed by his own grief, he decided to leave his practice. Irene vents her anger with pulling up a fight at her basketball championship game, which result in her month long suspension from the team. Paola finds other ways to fight it, by talking about Andrea but trying to shut the chapter, it too doesn't help. There are signs of family breaking since the happiness has faded away, sorrow pushing the family member to disconnect, pushing them to weep in bedrooms, changing rooms, all alone, secretly. They organize a funeral mass to shut the doors to grief, but the memories tickles into their life via unknown letters, some new pictures, some old secrets, fossilized grief lives pertaining to Andrea.

The film in the end shows that how the family overcomes Andrea's loss.

There are some brilliant scenes in the movie : The scenes where Giovanni interacts with the patients and the patients tells their stories. After the death of Andrea when one of the patient tells the story of her husband and kids, Giovanni bursts into tears.

The scene where after the death of Andrea Giovanni goes to a carnival park to forget his grief but inturn finds himself isolated and left out in the midst of the colourful happiness around.

In another scene Giovanni finds that everything in the house has a crack and he has not noted this during the happy time .

The scenes are very simple but it make a big impact on emotional level. Take for instance the scene where after the death of Andrea, Giovanni goes to his son's room and plays the music on his son's music system. He continously keeps pressing the remote and keeps playing the same music again and again. The background score is also excellent that is with the mood of this film.

The Son's Room, with all the sorrow and grief, shows how the dead never dies, and how we continue to live with them. This was a movie where even though there was some technical flaws but the screenplay and the emotional content of the script is so strong that it overshadows the technical shortcommings.

An excerpt from Nanni Moretti's interview " I wanted to tell this story in a more classical, but not conventional, style. I really care about it and feel it's very close to me. The family's deep pain doesn't unite them, but tears them apart. For the figure of the psychoanalyst, I wanted the sessions with patients to be credible. American scriptwriters, afraid of boring the audience, are always taking him out of the office. I made two definte choices about the film: to set it in a small town and to put the doctor's office on the same floor as his residence. The first was important because, not only have I shot Rome in every possible way, but away from Rome I have more concentration. And when you lose a son in a smaller community, you feel the warmth and solidarity around the family. The studio is on the same landing as Giovanni's apartment to show that for him to do his job, he needed his family and vice versa. In his home, he can't separate himself completely from the suffering he works with. "