The Son's Room

Nanni Moretti had spent twenty-five years as Italian cinema's most reliable ironist — the diarist of Caro diario, the political satirist, the man who played himself on a Vespa. Then he made a film with no jokes in it and won the Palme d'Or, the first Italian to do so in more than two decades.

Moretti plays Giovanni, an analyst in Ancona whose sessions with a rotating cast of patients form the film's steady background hum. Laura Morante is his wife Paola; Jasmine Trinca and Giuseppe Sanfelice are the children. The first half is domestic, unhurried and slightly comic — a family that likes each other, a father who jogs, an argument about a stolen fossil at the children's school. Then a Sunday call from a patient rearranges everything, and the film becomes a study of a man professionally trained in other people's grief discovering that the training is worthless.

Some Italian critics found it too restrained, too far from the Moretti they knew; the Cannes jury under Liv Ullmann had no such hesitation. What makes it endure is the refusal of catharsis — no confrontation scene, no speech, nothing that resolves. Instead it watches three people in the same house grieve at different speeds and in incompatible ways, and it is honest enough to suggest that the incompatibility may be permanent.