Quiet Chaos

Pietro is a successful Roman executive. One summer day at the beach, he and his brother Carlo dive into the sea to save two women who are drowning. When Pietro gets home, he learns that his wife has died, at the very moment he was saving the life of a stranger. He does not cry. He does not collapse. Instead, on the first day of school, he promises his ten-year-old daughter that he will wait for her outside until classes end. And he does. Every day, on a bench in a little park opposite the school.

Adapted from Sandro Veronesi's novel, which won the Strega Prize, the film is directed by Antonello Grimaldi, but it belongs to Nanni Moretti, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays Pietro. The bench becomes a kind of confessional. Colleagues, his brother, his sister-in-law, the woman he saved, all come to visit, expecting to comfort him, and end up unloading their own problems on a man who listens and says almost nothing. Around him the small life of the square goes on: a boy with Down syndrome, a woman walking her Saint Bernard, the man at the kiosk.

It is a strange, gentle film about grief that refuses to arrive on schedule, and about how stillness can be a form of resistance. Moretti, all dry irony and held-back pain, is perfect for it. Alessandro Gassmann won a David di Donatello as the brother, and Valeria Golino and Isabella Ferrari are excellent. The soundtrack mixes Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright with an original song by Ivano Fossati. It competed at Berlin in 2008. Patient, humane and quietly devastating.