MUBI

Watch out for this one, it looks harmless but it bites. There’s a personal tale of family bereavement, mourning, parental bonding – everything the Comencini tendency of Italian cinema has always loved and sobbed at, to which Nanni Moretti himself has given much effort and too much reputation. But don’t be fooled, the ‘calm chaos’ (read, quiet desperation) is not in the bereaved and grieving, they know quite well by instinct how to go their way, and ‘Caos calmo’ isn’t so much about coping with the loss of a loved one as about the protection provided by a definite grief when everyone and everything else is falling apart. That being the case, there’s nothing which could be said to be encouraging here – Paladini’s ‘madness’ is the only islet of sanity to which all his ‘normal’ entourage turn as an anchor in their craziness, so when he turns back to the normal course, what is there left to hold on to – a Down’s syndrome boy, a dog, and a plate of pasta? Frail foundations, pushed into the corners of existence, watching like pilgrims at a sacrament while Moretti consults (or is consulted by) a small non-eternal capitalist God, and a colleague relays, baffled, how his partner negates the people she speaks to with verbal hatchets – and then in the next breath negates what she just said which nobody can bear to admit to have heard. And still the reviews say this is just about a middle-class father who loses his wife…

No satisfactory conclusion though, no unsatisfactory conclusion either, it ends with a shrug and a getaway. But somewhere, either in the source novel (which I haven’t read, and haven’t heard much to encourage me to read) or the adaptation, there’s Moravia’s skill for taking a personal drama and dissecting a social heart.