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. C

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