The Son's Room, 2001

This one went on the queue long ago, and then once it arrived it sat around so long I forgot the plot description. So for the first hour or so, I enjoyed this thoughtful, pleasant drama of a contemporary Italian family. I thought the portrait of the father's love for his son---his wanting him to be good, to be better, to strive, was moving and real, not abusive or pushy. Maybe there was, I thought, a deeper mystery about a lie the son may have told. The dad is a psychoanalyst, but relatively loose and humanistic, far from a strict old-school Freudian---with a very large closet full of sports shoes, to show he has his own neuroses. The glimpses of sessions with his various patients nicely demonstrate the combination of genuine caring and bored, sometimes funny, daydreaming that marks his profession. And then I got hit with the hammer of a plot turn, which I should have expected, I suppose. I assume you know what it is, but the story unfolds with great artfulness that kept me engaged. So effective is it, that at times I felt like it was systematically ripping my heart out in little pieces. Maybe because I lost a family member recently this seemed acute, but I think it is a fine film---it won at Cannes, a somewhat cynical crowd. Or maybe the family's holding a religious service felt very real, very hurting, even as the reasonable, helping-profession father twisted in discomfort at the inadequacy of the priest's words. I realized as it ended that besides the shredding it was also slowly massaging my heart back to life and by the end I had been walked back into the light, feeling a catharsis in the classical sense. I think its depiction of love indwelling in the familial form has rarely been so well drawn. Or was I sentimentally seduced? My impression was that there was relatively little movie goopiness going on, but is this just a big, effective weeper? I'm thinking it is not. 2.10

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