Not only a perceptive and honest addition to literature about family bereavement, this film also explores powerfully the connections between personal experience and the clinician’s professional relationship with patients. This is of course most evident in the case of psychotherapy, but is equally applicable to other doctor-patient relationships.

A large part of the film takes place in Giovanni’s practice. The film allows the audience to identify with the analyst, listening at first to his various patients’ stories, some moving, others amusing, with a degree of clinical detachment. After Andrea’s death, however, scenes like this become hard to endure.

We, the audience, need to process our own loss of the character and our identification with Giovanni’s grief, and instead we are forced, with him, to listen to the anxieties of his patients, which suddenly seem almost outrageously petty and selfish. The challenges of empathy and of professionalism in the face of personal agony has surely seldom been so vividly presented. Gradually, Giovanni’s work deteriorates and he decides to give up. The scenes where he tells his patients he is leaving them are perceptive and complex.

The film does not offer easy resolution or closure. Arianna allows the family a little extra time to say goodbye to their son: she has photographs of him that they have never seen. When they part from her in France, it seems they can now acknowledge his death.