There are powerhouse performances and queasily effective scenes in this story of a man who suspects his neighbour of abuse, but it’s a soapy shadow of The Son’s Room
Nanni Moretti has come to Cannes with this watchable and tautly structured soap-operatic ensemble movie about four families living in the same apartment building, adapted from the popular bestseller Three Floors Up by the
Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, and transplanted from the original Tel Aviv setting to Rome.There is an element of emollient sentimentality, especially in the way the plot lines are neatly tied up, but a good deal of storytelling gusto and ingenuity, and there are also echoes (perhaps deliberately engineered) of Moretti’s greatest film and Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Son’s Room, from 2001.Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti) are a stressed professional couple with an infant daughter for whom they often need a babysitter – so they are happy to leave her with the elderly couple next door: Giovanna (Anna Bonauito) and Renato (Paolo Graziosi). But Lucio is unnerved by Renato’s apparent slide into dementia, and his strange, borderline-inappropriate tactile relationship with Lucio’s little girl when they drop her off.