La Stanza del figlio (2001) - film review

Giovanni is a psychoanalyst whose life is up-ended one day when his son, Andrea, is killed in a scuba diving accident.  As the family struggles to comes to term with their loss, they receive an unexpected visit from a young girl whom Andrea met on holiday…

Nanni Moretti’s poignant tale of family bereavement, La Stanza del figlio, was a surprising but worthy winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 2001.   Moretti, who also stars in the film, uses an approach which is strikingly direct in its humanity, managing to avoid excessive sentimentality and melodrama.

Thanks largely to some credible performances, it is easy for the audience to identify with the film’s protagonists and to share their grief and their love of life.  Some spectators may perhaps cringe at the all too perfect family in which teenage children not only speak to their parents but share their leisure time together.  However, it is possibly the fact that the family functions so well which makes the sense of tragedy, when it strikes, all the more acute.

The intense melancholy of the subject is subtly lifted with some pleasing comic touches, so that the film is poignant but not depressing.  The death of a child is perhaps the hardest thing a parent can endure, and the film makes that abundantly clear (Italians are not, after all, renowned for their lack of emotion).  Yet, the same time, it shows how that grief can be lived through and the wound ultimately healed.

© James Travers 2002

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