Pietro Paladini (Nanni Moretti), the main character of Antonello Grimaldi’s slice-of-life drama Quiet Chaos, watches his life fall to pieces when his wife unexpectedly dies as the result of a freak fall. Faced with a young daughter, Claudia (Blu Yoshimi), Pietro must find a way to cope with this sudden and unexpected tumult as a single parent — and he makes an almost obsessive commitment to wait outside of Claudia’s school, all day, every day, until she emerges from the building.

The film benefits enormously from the low-key, contemplative scenes that wisely depict the confused and messy emotional states of Pietro following the precipitous event that sets his life on a different course. We witness his emotional isolation, a benumbing calm that suddenly (amid a private moment) explodes into a torrent of grief, and an overwhelming disorientation about how to proceed with his life or whether to proceed with his life. Pietro’s simple decision to spend his days in the park across from Claudia’s classroom speaks volumes about an inner terror tied to the need for security, to hang on to the one treasure in his life that he has left and to provide a warm center of reassurance to the young girl about his own permanence at a critical stage of her life. As an actor, Moretti projects and explores these emotional states with the effortlessness of a master.

All of this, of course, is prime Moretti (even though Grimaldi takes the directorial reins, Moretti co-authored the script and his influence can be felt throughout). And anyone who reveled in the star’s Golden Palm winner The Son’s Room (2001) will find more of the same gentle human poetry about familial loss in this outing.

Unfortunately, the scenes that deal with the grieving only represent half of the equation in Chaos. The other half — the portion of the drama tied to Pietro’s work life — feels ineptly conceived. Though Pietro’s job, in the broadest sense, involves some sort of corporate-based television production, we’re never entirely clear on the specific tasks that it demands of him or his role vis-à-vis those of his colleagues. Also, when his co-workers turn up in the park to discuss goings-on with him, the conflicts that arise surrounding the corporation’s merger strike one as badly muddled and hopelessly confusing — particularly a recurring Catholic metaphor about Pietro as one-third of the “holy trinity” within the corporation.

The film’s tone feels inconsistent, as well. At times, Moretti and his co-scribes attempt to work in off-color humor, such as a subplot about a colleague’s mentally ill wife stricken by vulgar outbursts that she cannot remember afterward. The purpose of these moments is anyone’s guess; the scriptwriters may have been attempting to provide a tonal counterpoint to the bittersweet melancholy of the father-daughter scenes, but instead of functioning in that manner, the scenes violate the mood of the surrounding sequences and feel offensive.

That points to another issue inherent in the film. It grows shockingly raw and profane at times with obscene (though not quite pervasive) language that feels extremely ill-advised and out of place given the subject matter, and a third-act sex scene between Pietro and a rich female acquaintance is so graphic, it almost brings the film into the land of softcore. The explicit sex wouldn’t be an issue if it blended in fluidly with the remainder of the drama or even if it represented the culmination of a lengthy character arc in Pietro that we have witnessed throughout the motion picture. But such is not the case. The roughness of the intercourse (which includes an act of sexual abuse) suggests the need for Pietro to extinguish rage and hostility, but this is the first sign of such emotion that we have witnessed, so it feels pulled from way out of left field — an assaultive sequence, it succeeds only in shocking the audience in the worst sense.

As a film that takes on far more than it can handle, Quiet Chaos would feel far more effective if stripped down to the sequences between Pietro and Claudia, and those that explore Pietro’s emotions. In its current state, it strikes one as incongruous, disjointed, and only partially successful.