Grief encounter

Italian drama Caos calmo
is a melancholy curiosity

SLOW BURN: Caos Calmo

by MARK SLUTSKY

The day he saves a woman from drowning on the beach, Pietro Paladini returns with his brother to their vacation villa to find his wife dead on the ground. Left alone with their daughter, he’s forced to deal—or not deal—with this sudden tragedy.

That’s the basic plot of Caos Calmo (Calm Chaos), a film by Italy’s Antonio Luigi Grimaldi and starring fellow director Nanni Moretti, and which has caused some controversy in its native land over a particularly raw sex scene—though not one likely to ruffle many feathers over here. Otherwise, it’s a nice little drama, a movie where not much happens but everything percolates below the surface, a study of human relationships and interconnection, mostly playing out in a park in Rome where the bereaved Paladini (played by Moretti) hangs out.

After his wife’s death, he’s lost interest in his job as an executive at a big Italian TV company that’s inching towards a major, controversial merger with an American corporation. So instead, he spends his days waiting outside his daughter’s (Blu Di Martino) school, observing and interacting with the various characters who pass by, as well as entertaining the occasional guest.

He’s removed from his world, and, it becomes clear, from his emotions as well. Though unruffled and cheerful on the surface, Moretti is clearly suppressing a reservoir of deep and painful emotion—grief, compounded by suspicions that his wife was having an affair, compounded by many more emotional complications involving a past relationship with his sister-in-law, his handsome junkie brother and the identity of the woman he saved that day on the beach. Calm chaos indeed. It’s a great slow burn: it takes at least an hour before the cracks start to really show.

This is a very small, very intimate drama, though strangely layered at points with blasts of bombastic indie rock. I’m not sure it entirely succeeds at what it’s trying to do—well, to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what it is trying to do—but I enjoyed watching it. Though better known for his directing work (Caro Diario, La stanza del figlio), Moretti has a great hangdog face, and he underplays the role perfectly. A melancholy curiosity.

CAOS CALMO OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JAN. 16