Quiet Chaos (2009)

Behind the camera, the Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room) can be an inspired artist, but as an actor he's annoyingly affectless, like a Buster Keaton who has been forbidden to do any stunts. As Pietro in Quiet Chaos, a newly widowed father who opts out of work to spend each day planted in front of his daughter's grade school (ah, those laissez-faire Italian office codes!), Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience. We get the point — Pietro is a man who ''shows'' his grief by showing nothing — but the film forces us to keep getting it, over and over again.

more