THE SON'S ROOM
Directed by Nanni Moretti.
Italy / 2001 / 35mm
Spare me the energy of having to defend Moretti from sarcastic reappraisers, those whose columns are usually identified by moviegoing burn-out and a glib, above-it-all attitude-abstractions of actual criticism. Not for a moment did any of these critics consider The Son's Room for what it is: a film that exposes the bad, cheap sentimentality of the "TV melodrama" as an emotional facet worth exploring. If the film's dissenters didn't find it to be crushingly sad, then it's a true matter of opinion. But if that sentiment was rejected, overlooked, remaining comfortably within reach so if they happen to get tired of Bressonian detachment, what then will be the place of The Son's Room within Moretti's career? His worst film, the most treasured by the masses? Or a good film, not his best, but his most successful? I would argue for the latter if I wasn't so opposed to the annoying practice of labelling. Truth is, The Son's Room blends perfectly with his past tendencies, so the words "sell-out" need not apply.
Moretti, who began his career first as a radical, then as a reformed radical, then as a priest, and then as a water polo player (among other things), usually still needs an introduction when it comes to international audiences. His work is not that of any movement in film, rather emerging, most noticeably in Ecce Bombo (1978), from a deeply-founded leftist stance. He is compared to Woody Allen because, quite simply, his "heavy" politics intensify in a way that impedes the personal, becoming secondary to human relationships. And for Moretti, the personal is all that cinema can be. His personality is that of a self-deprecator, neurotic, and skeptic. He makes fun of himself and others constantly as he goes along. The Son's Room—the story of a family learning to deal with a son's death—is not his first foray into the sentimental, as several uninformed speculators insisted in Cannes. His debut, I Am Self Sufficient (1976), dealt with child separation and domestic anxiety in a serious way, and his later films The Mass Is Ended (1985) and Caro Diario (1994) had long stretches without any comedy.
Here is where Moretti takes the biggest risk though: the death at the center of The Son's Room is not an auxiliary force that guides the characters; it's the very thing that motivates the plot. Hence the drippy title, which has no other meaning beyond the surface. Though written before his previous Aprile (1998), one can see the structural evolution in his work as in the former film, a man becomes a father and it changes his life. Still, Aprile is multi-layered, whereas The Son's Room might play like a one-note to some people. What keeps it invigorating is the subjective cinematic language Moretti has mastered; in the scenes leading up to the son's death, there is an inexplicably tense shot of his mother (Laura Morante) in the car as a large truck and motorcycle drive speedily by. Next thing we know, the cuts have sped up, and the son's had a fatal accident. Though there is no indication of this, of course, so it's a violent blow to the audience. Moretti even insists we see the nails being driven into the coffin barely a reel's-length after the death.
For the remainder of the film we're supposed to reconcile knowing the facts. Moretti intentionally leaves a feeling of idleness; in a crappy TV-film, there would be an empty gimmick to ensure the plot moves forward, while at the same time leaving the audience in a comfortable state of identification. The Son's Room stubbornly focuses on the devastation and nothing else: Morante's character cries and cries alone in her room, while Moretti, playing the father, seems infatuated by the outside world which can help him keep the memory of his son alive. This family, like the filmmaker, wants to know the undiluted emotional truth about death, sparred of any hypothesis (which is what the film's critics want). Moretti is too intelligent to fall into art-film formulas, or indeed, bland soap-opera.
In another glorious display of reconciliation (best not described, but what the hell), the family takes an unexpected journey, crossing into a different zone, as a result of learning and becoming involved with a part of the dead son's past. It's symbolic of many things, but mainly that we don't really decide the grand course of our lives. The pace, characters and each moment out of time- suddenly this family loves being lost in the universe. It's a brave step for Moretti, and one can't help but wonder what his next film will be like. A venture into The Son's Room is a window into a problem: What makes the most hardened of international cinephiles equate him or herself with a director whose source of security has always been the ability to revise his personality many times over? The answer might be in our freedom, as moviegoers, to walk into the movies as revisionists - expecting each film to contradict the next, cancel the next, prove to be the exception to the next - and walking out with an objective answer. I love Moretti for this reason.