While Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and his brother Carlos (Alessandro Gassman) are playing a keenly contested game of beach tennis, they hear cries from the sea. Ignoring advice from men on the shore that the sea is too dangerous, they plunge in and save two drowning women. When they return the women to the beach, the two men receive neither acknowledgement nor thanks. Although Carlos calls the people ‘shits’, Pietro is much more sanguine.
Pietro returns to his home to find that his wife has had a sudden fall and died, and the calm resignation, he showed on the beach, appears to be tenor of his bereavement. The next day he takes his small daughter, Claudia (Blu Yoshimi) to school and promises her that he will wait for her all day outside the school; which he does, for days, then weeks. Pietro becomes a mystery even to himself. He effectively quits his job as a media executive, although he arrives at the school each day in his suit. But it is his inability to grieve, and the equal calm of his daughter that haunts him.
If Pietro has difficulties with his own emotions, others see him as a truly grieving father and husband. He becomes the still centre of the chaotic lives of those around him. His fellow company executives seek him out as his company enters a back-stabbing merger; his sister-in-law, with whom he had a brief affair, pours out details of her pregnancy, and her need to retaliate against the father of the unborn child; Eleonora (Isabella Ferrari), the woman whom he has pulled from the sea, finds him to establish the details of the rescue, and the ‘advice’ of her husband. When she has heard what Pietro has to say, we see her walk away, take off her wedding ring, and drop it down a storm drain. Finally, the big boss, Steiner, played in a brief walk-on with charismatic malevolence by Roman Polanski, comes to ask Pietro’s advice about the merger.
Nanni Moretti plays Pietro with aching dignity, and when the grief and emotion erupts, it does so with piercing effect. He remains the focus of the film at all times and sometimes the camera circles around him as he stays still and detached. But the ensemble parts are all played with quiet power, especially Blu Yoshimi as his philosopher daughter. When she returns from her gymnastics practice, Claudia tells her father that her teacher has told her that her handstands are still not perfect. Pietro tells her that no one is perfect and asks what she means by ‘perfect’, anyway. Claudia replies, ‘I mean ‘perfect’ in the absolute sense’. It is Claudia’s understanding of the idea of ‘irreversible’ that finally allows Pietro to give up his vigil.
There is a rather brutal and over-long sex scene between Pietro and Eleonora that seems quite outside the rhythms of this film. But Quiet Chaos, or Calm Chaos as the BBFC certificate has it, is a profoundly moving study of fidelity in its various forms, with a unusually life-affirming perspective on parenthood.