The boldest stroke in Nanni Moretti’s Quiet Chaos is in what it doesn’t do, rather than what it does. In a movie about a media executive called Pietro Paladini (Moretti) whose wife dies in a freak fall, leaving him to bring up their ten-year-old daughter alone, the spectre of an emotional meltdown, Shadowlands style, hangs over the movie like a threatening storm cloud.

And yet, miraculously, it never breaks. Bar some hastily shed tears in the front seat of his BMW, Paladini is denied that Hollywoodian catharsis that defines so many grief movies. Instead, the writer-star Moretti and his director, Antonio Grimaldi, build a devastating portrait of a man mildly estranged from his daughter yet completely out of touch with his own humanity.

Paladini, riven with guilt about his wife’s death, abandons the office and decamps to a park bench directly opposite his daughter’s school. Here, while ostensibly standing guard, Paladini encounters locals, strangers, friends and family (including Valeria Golino’s unhinged sister-in-law Marta, and Alessandro Gassman’s impossibly suave brother Carlo), who force him to face some uncomfortable questions: How much did he really love his wife? How much did he know her? And how much does he know himself?

In all this Moretti, present in nearly every scene, like an open wound, is ineffably empathetic. It speaks volumes for his sad hangdog features and avuncular demeanour that the movie’s most uncomfortable moment is a despondent rough-sex scene between Moretti and Eleonora (Isabelle Ferrari). Elsewhere, the self-reflection is undercut by the quality of top-flight talent in supporting roles (including Roman Polanski as a company CEO) and a slew of immaculately crafted one-liners.

In the bracing opening moments, for instance, in a wealthy coastal resort, when Paladini and Carlo save two female bathers from drowning but are casually rebuffed by the locals, Carlo muses, in what has to be one of the year’s standout lines: “We saved two bitches on a beachful of shitheads!”

15, 105 minutes

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