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The Son's Room

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A startling change of pace, so we're told, for the director and star, Nanni Moretti: "the Italian Woody Allen." That's hard to gauge, however, much less appreciate, when only one of his nine features and numerous shorts, 1993's Caro Diario, has been granted distribution. Not much pace can be built up from one film. No doubt the heavy drama of The Son's Room, to do with the loss of a child, marks a change from the first-person humorous "essay" of Caro Diario, though the change, to be a stickler about it, is more in tone than in pace: an easygoing, meandering, random-sampling manner of storytelling. (Because it ambles along a lot like life, its interruptions seem particularly rude.) In the lead role, Moretti's dour bearded countenance doesn't give away much: an ideal countenance for the character's vocation of psychotherapist. There is perhaps a hint of triteness, a slight impression of padding, in the sessions with his clients, punctuated as they are by discreet eye-rolling and daydreaming. These nevertheless occupy an important place in the broad and balanced pattern of homelife and worklife, and they set up a resonant backdrop of human fears and feelings. And the blame that the therapist cannot help but attach to one hapless client, who had tampered with destiny on the fateful day, is a fascinating wrinkle in the fabric. Ideal as his countenance might be on the job, it is ill-adapted to the role of grieving father; and his excruciating discomfort in that role, his losing struggle to stay buttoned-down, enables him to summon up deep emotion with minimal emoting. (Wife and daughter come in for their fair share as well.) More simply: for all his reserve, he's a very likable guy. And an even more likable filmmaker. If we feel, in one curious instance, that maybe it's middle-aged wishful thinking (rather than Italian good taste) when a long-haired record-store clerk is seen recommending a Brian Eno album to a shopping grown-up as something a young person might enjoy, it only endears Moretti the more. With Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca, Giuseppe Sanfelice. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd

Rated R

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