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Un/Familiar Dysfunction: The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti 2001 Italian)

Actors

Nanni Moretti ...         Giovanni Sermonti

Laura Morante            ...         Paola Sermonti

Jasmine Trinca...          Irene Sermonti

Giuseppe Sanfelice...  Andrea Sermonti

A cursory look at Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001) might give the impression that it simply and poignantly narrates the story of a family that is suddenly stopped in its content routine tracks by the untimely death of one of the family members. The Sermonti family comprises of the father Giovanni Sermonti (portrayed by the director himself, Nanni Moretti), the mother Paola Sermonti (Laura Morante), the daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and the son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice). One fine weekend, the son dies while he is scuba diving with his friends.

A deeper inspection of the film suggests that the film is not simply about how a family attempts to overcome and accept the loss of this death. It is also about depicting that an element of dysfunction always exists even in the best of families, families that think they are happy and perfect, while not being able to self-reflect about their own inadequacies and deficiencies. The narrative leverages the father’s/Giovanni’s point of view of various events in the diegesis over that of other characters while simultaneously amply providing a third-person perspective towards the father himself. Through the father’s character, the film takes us into the family’s fractured interiors that illusorily appear complete and sorted-out from the outside.    

The film’s choice to depict the father as a psychoanalyst is quite interesting and not without significance; one needs to dwell upon it in slightly more detail. Both of Andrea’s parents are working in professions that require a certain degree of intellectual finesse. They are attentive and sensitive to their children, but perhaps just not enough. The mother Paola seems to be too sure of her perception of Andrea. She is convinced beyond a doubt that Andrea would never steal the fossil from the school’s laboratory. However, Giovanni is sceptical regarding his son’s innocence —— perhaps because he is a psychoanalyst who is able to figure out his son’s behaviour but not have any basis to say so or because he knew his son too well to feel that something was not right with Andrea or both. Andrea’s revelation to his mother makes it clear that both the parents had failed to decipher that Andrea had indeed indulged in the theft of the fossil as a way to derive fun from a school teacher’s reaction about the fossil.    

Being a psychoanalyst, Giovanni is trained and disposed to understand the emotional and/or psychological problems and traumas of other people. There is a variety of people, mostly adults who are at different phases of their life, who come to Giovanni to get counselling to cope with their anxieties, inhibitions and obsessions. Giovanni, on his part, is able to analyse and advise all these people with a spectacular sense of calmness. However, the death of his son changes this. Among his patients, the ones who stood out were the middle-aged woman who was reluctant to start dating again and the man who was frustrated, even obsessed, with his uninhibited sexual activities with anyone and everyone except his own wife! It was amazing how the man exploded when Giovanni tells him about his inability to remain his analyst any further. Despite his expertise in analysing and knowing the human mind, Giovanni feels a void when it comes to knowing his own son.

The latter half of the narrative takes us through Giovanni’s gradual realisation of the fact that he might have erred in not making enough time/efforts to understand his son. Giovanni’s lack of objectivity, following his son’s death, is not merely due to the loss of his son but due to the realisation that he did not or was not able to know and understand his son as well as he thought he did. It is in the photographs that Arianna gives to Andrea’s parents that his room is brought to the fore. However,  of the photographs actually provide an insight into Andrea’s mind. The titular ‘room’ points to Andrea’s mental space. Through Arianna and the photographs she gives them, the parents are able to get a never-before-seen glimpse into Andrea’s life. Giovanni’s guilt was not only because his son had passed away untimely (‘survivor guilt’?); it was rather a guilt that emanated from his inability to not (being able to) know his son well enough, despite his expertise as a psychoanalyst, while the boy was still alive. Giovanni is conscious enough to engage in introspection. This becomes especially evident in the scene where Giovanni angrily and remorsefully tells Paola about the various fractured objects in the kitchen. The crevices in the various china-clay objects a metaphor for the inadequacies and flaws in the family itself (or Giovanni himself)?         

It makes more sense to understand The Son’s Room as a film that draws attention towards the role of parents in raising kids and understanding them as individuals, instead of looking at it as simply a film that depicts a family that is mourning the loss of a dear one. The superiority of parents in the hierarchy that operates between parents and children might imbue in them a feeling of privilege and self-assuredness. Giovanni's character gives a feeling that being parents might be a place of privilege but it also needs to be seen as a place that demands immense introspection in the context of parent-child relationship.