The Son's Room

Giovanni is a psychoanalyst in a northern Italian town, living an ordered life with his wife Paola and their two teenagers, Irene and Andrea. One Sunday he takes an emergency patient call instead of running with his son; Andrea goes diving and does not come back. The household that felt secure comes apart, each member left alone with the same loss.

Moretti, who directed and plays Giovanni, keeps the register low: no large scenes, only small ruptures in a routine that no longer holds. The film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2001. Critics noted how plainly it renders bereavement, refusing crisis and catharsis for the dull, repetitive texture of days that must be got through.

For a clinician the subject sits unusually close. Giovanni keeps seeing patients while unable to hold his own feeling; the containing function he offers others fails inside his family. His guilt fastens on the ordinary decision, the swapped morning, that he cannot stop rewriting. Few films place the analyst, rather than the patient, at the centre of the collapse.