Starring: Nanni Moretti, Blu Yoshimi, Isabella Ferrari, and Alessandro Gassman.
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 112 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Pietro is a successful business executive who has lost touch with his human side for some time. Following the death of his wife, he takes time off to sit on a park bench opposite his daughter’s school, have coffee at a nearby café, walk in the park, and observe what is happening around him. Doing these things, he is exposed to a flow of life passing by, which slowly awakens the full extent of his grief and provides him at long last with his lost sense of humanity. The behaviour of the people, who pass by him, expresses much more than the routineness of what they are doing, and his calmness impacts soothingly on the drama of their lives. Moretti plays the role of Pietro with powerful understatement. The film is never cloying, and provides a very moving statement of a man’s grief and emerging attachment to his young daughter.
Ironically, one of the women he saves from drowning at the start of the movie enters into a sexual relationship with him towards the end. The sex scene between Pietro and Eleonora (Isabella Ferrari) is a cathartic display of his own aggression. The rough sex with Eleonora is fuelled by his resentment of her, and anger at the loss of his wife. For a person who is newly discovering his humanity, it is a surprising scene to include; it is devoid of warmth or intimacy of any kind. The Catholic Church in Italy has said that the scene needed to be excised, and that it had no merit to be included. The scene does have an explanation, but it is necessary to draw attention to it and warn that it is there, and it is majorly responsible for the film’s censorship classification. Does the scene violate the mood of the film, or did the Director think it necessary to use it to show how Pietro really feels? The message is unclear and the scene’s inclusion is enigmatic.
Morretti’s performance as Pietro is excellent, and so also is that of Blu Yoshimi, who brings a special maturity to her role as Claudia. Roman Polanski plays a cameo role as the CEO of Pietro’s company, and the characters flowing past Pietro’s park bench add a great deal of charm and gentle humour to his voyage towards self-discovery. Pietro’s humanity, which he eventually finds, helps him guide the recovery of his own daughter.
This is a beautifully directed movie, sensitively edited, and acted, and it never flags for a moment. It shows the dawning awareness of real grief over loss, and the path to discovery of a father’s genuine love for his child, a love that has never been fully expressed. The movie, except for the sex-scene, is full of warmth and understanding. Signs of grief in this movie don’t come from large gestures or authoritative statements about what feelings really mean, or from moments of expressed sentimentality. Rather, they are implicitly obvious, and they emanate from Pietro’s subtle interactions with the people around him. The title of the movie, “Quiet (or calm) Chaos”, is descriptive of a person who has never known the full meaning of emotional attachment, and Pietro is trying to find his way. Pietro’s initially calm response to his loss gives no early clue to the emotional chaos underneath, but it is a chaos that almost overwhelms him. The movie shows how sadness, love, anger and desperation all contribute to our actions, and we need to understand their human significance.
Nanni Moretti is no stranger to the portrayal of emotion, being a director himself who has won Festival awards in the past. Interestingly, the film is produced by Domenico Procacci, who was also the producer for Matteo Garrone’s prize winning “Gomorrah”, just released in Australia. The quiet humour in the movie provides light relief from heavy drama, but more importantly it signifies that life itself can be fragile, and that our humanity can never be taken for granted.
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