The Son's Room

In The Son's Room, writer-director-star Nanni Moretti exchanges his usual sense of humor for a long bout of depression. Dubbed "the Italian Woody Allen," Moretti has tracked the ups and downs of Italy's '60s generation in such free-floating films as Caro Diario and Aprile. This time, he's gone with a straightforward narrative about a happy Northern Italian family that loses one of its members and must somehow repair the damage. Playing a psychoanalyst who loses patience with his patients when his own life spins out of control, Moretti is so low-key as to barely hold the screen. But The Son's Room, like the similarly titled In the Bedroom, refuses to wallow in grief. Unlike In the Bedroom, it also refuses to wallow in revenge. You don't put this kind of thing behind you, Moretti's unsentimental film seems to say. You put one foot in front of the other, and someday, when you happen to look back there, it's behind you.