In Antonio Grimaldi’s Quiet Chaos life makes summary decisions both casual and cruel. Two men, brothers, stand on an Italian beach enacting lifelong banter when cries for help take them into the water, dragging out a pair of floundering swimmers who nearly drown them with their frenzied panic. Exhausted and not thanked, the men drive back to the family holiday villa with the bravado of the living. When they arrive they find the older brother’s wife dead, a fall turned tragic. Pieces of the melon she’d just cut lay scattered around her broken body.
How does one grieve in the face of such an unexpected, almost mockingly prosaic, death? For the widowed Pietro Paladini (Nanni Moretti) the answer is to retreat. On the first day he takes his 10-year-old daughter Claudia (Blu Yoshimi) to school he promises her that he’ll wait outside, deciding to literally take up residence in the park opposite amidst the benches, paths and unassuming café. Given the film’s easy acceptance of Pietro’s melancholic distance it’s an obvious decision: sparse strings and ripples of piano mark his emotional detachment.
Once you get past the fact that Moretti, here the star and co-writer of the screenplay that adapts Sandro Veronesi’s book, has himself previously directed a more acutely touching movie about the stages of grief with 2001’s The Son’s Room, Quiet Chaos finds its own purpose. On a wider level it’s a mordant satire of obsessive business culture. Pietro is a senior executive at a cable network and when he starts effectively working from the park his career doesn’t miss a beat. Various colleagues come to woo him back to the office but each ends up confiding in him. The less he cares about corporate undertakings the higher he rises.
As a character study it lets a new social fabric coalesce around Pietro, with his daily routine giving him a renewed perspective. The picture’s salient points are not particularly radical: we’re part of a community that cares, grief can wipe away long held illusions, children beget innocence, and family is both a blessing and distraction. Played with a cannily charismatic despondency by Moretti, Pietro pulls the story towards him, inspiring an openness in others that he’s denied to himself. It’s best observed in his sister-in-law Marta (Valeria Golino), who brings an unexpected tenderness to her part as the family’s whirlwind-in-chief.
Grimaldi is an assuming visual stylist. Too often he resorts to slowly zooming in on Moretti’s solemn face, but he has a better feel for the story’s various tendrils. Instead of trying to tie everything together he keeps the film anchored to his protagonist’s viewpoint – people dip in and out of Pietro’s life but the storyline lets them slip away, often without resolution. We meet both the woman he saved at the film’s opening and, eventually, his mistress, with whom he shares a surprisingly frank sex scene that actually works to illustrate his emotional state.
As such there’s not so much a resolution as a quiet traversal of intent. This is not a great film by any means, but its resistance to a neatly inclusive finale is welcome. And it does have a sterling cameo, from a great filmmaker who is cast with mercurial intent, to round it out.
