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A Bloggy Collection of Haphazard Scribings about Music and maybe other things...

Saturday, 11 April 2009

Brian Eno + Nanni Moretti = A Work of Pure Genius

I want to make a recommendation.

For anyone who is vaguely keen on film, go and rent or buy or download or steal or maybe just borrow 'La Stanza del Figlio' ('The Son's Room'), a film which won the first Palme D'Or in over 20 years for Italy in 2001. The plot is very simple really. A comfortable middle class family suffers the tragic death of their beautiful son. That's basically it. The film expresses the love and kinship of a family, and it's attempts to come to terms with tragedy and overcome their grief. It's a pretty standard idea, and could easily become just generically sentimental and nothing more. But what Moretti does so well is develop and maintain the dignified naturalism and realism of the characters, something Italian cinema has always been good at.


The small clip shows Moretti, the father, going into a music shop to get a CD for his son whose birthday it would have been that day. The assistant picks out a CD and goes to play it to give the father an idea. This is a crucial moment in the film. It's one of the key climaxes. The presentation of the father's emotional paralysis has been building to this understated catharsis for an hour. But what music to use? Imagine if the assistant was just standing in for a friend, and having absolutely no idea what he was doing picked out Bon Jovi, or accidentally played the wrong CD deck and the Venga Boys starts to blair out with Boom Boom Boom Boom. No. This is definitely all a matter of opinion, but he chooses possibly my favourite Brian Eno song 'By This River' from 'Before and After Science' (1977). It's one of the best pop songs I've heard. If you despise Brian Eno (not that that is actually possible), this would ruin the scene. But even if you're passively indifferent, I think it makes it one of the more memorable and poignant moments of cinema that I've experienced. I don't know how to and probably shouldn't try to describe it. The sorrowful melancholy of the music speaks like an understanding friend to the father. It expresses the unbearable feeling of loss but so sublimely that it also gives consolation. Maybe Eno really is God.

To cap off this bloggy wankery, combined together the dialogue, body language, setting and Eno's music are, all together, a perfectly understated sequence. Watch it!
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