I love the work of Italian actor and director Nanni Moretti, that subtly animated stillness he possesses. I could happily spend my time watching him eat pasta, drive a scooter or simply sit on a bench doing nothing very much at all.

So why did his most recent film, Quiet Chaos, out this month on DVD, and touching, quite coincidentally on many themes currently in the news, from the deaths of mothers of young children to fatal freak falls, disturb me so?

According to the film’s many, largely admiring, critics, it’s a tender portrayal of the soothing power of routine in dealing with grief, an off beat film about a man coming to terms with deep loss.

Pietro, a top television executive, suddenly widowed, finds he cannot pick up the pieces of his life. Unable to leave his ten year old daughter at school, he spends every day sitting on a bench in the park opposite her classroom. In the process, he has any number of interesting encounters with everyone from a local restaurant owner to a beautiful young woman who walks an enormous shaggy dog past his bench every day. There’s an almost painfully realistic scene ( except we’re not sure if it is, in fact, fantasy) of Pietro having sex with a woman he saved from drowning on the day of his wife’s death, from a freak fall.

Death suffuses this film, and it is certainly billed as a tender meditation on the unexpected ways that loss can hit us, and how parenthood can save us. Except I am really not sure that this is a film about loss and love at all. And while it may be a film about fathers, it certainly has precious little to say about mothers.

Pietro’s dead wife is the most resounding non-presence in a film that I can recall: barely glimpsed, hardly referred to, almost totally unmourned. Her sister, whom we learn Pietro had a brief affair with – Go Pietro! – is presented as little short of a nutcase.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the banal brutality of a possibly loveless marriage, can we sidestep with equal equanimity, the loss of a mother to a ten year old child? Father and daughter continue to live tranquilly in a lovely designer like apartment, where they eat delicious food, prepared by a chef.

It’s a wholly unrealistic portrait of parenthood, with Claudia seemingly totally unperturbed by the absence of her mother.…

Here’s an interesting looking group you could join……….…

This week I was at the House of Commons, chairing a meeting for The Maya Centre, an Islington based multi ethnic voluntary organisation that offers psychodynamic therapy to women on low incomes, work that is clearly making a huge difference. Despite its reputation as home of the rich and cool, Islington has many pockets of extreme deprivation, and associated ill health, including poor mental health; the Maya Centre’s work is crucial to helping large numbers of women move on with their lives.

But the House of Commons meeting, an act of bold political vision by the Maya Centre, had a wider political aim; to try and persuade policy makers and opinion formers of the huge benefit of psychodynamic therapy in this age of CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – particularly given the government’s recent announcement of extension of funds for the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies ( !APT) programme.

Three speakers, Lisa Baraitser, an academic from Birkbeck University of London, Catherine Crowther, a Jungian analyst who has worked mostly in the NHS, and Margot Waddell, a psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock Institute, gave really thoughtful and moving papers on the impact and clear benefit of long term therapy on womens’ lives and the lives of their families and so on wider society.

In essence, the argument of the meeting was that that while there may sometimes be a place for short term behavioural approaches, we must not lose sight of the immense value of slower, long term therapies that can really help people to think about their difficulties and find a way through.

The meeting was well attended by MP’s, therapists, regional health officials, figures in the therapy world, campaigners and journalists. Everyone was delighted that Sarah Brown was able to come for some of the meeting; in her influential role as first political lady, she has done important work on post natal and maternal health.

It was agreed by all there that we need take the campaign on, particularly in regard to those all crucial policy makers and funders, some of whom have been rather seduced by the economic benefits of CBT approaches to mental illness.

Anyone interested in discovering more about this debate, would do well to start with a very thoughtful article by writer and analyst Darian Leader in Guardian G2 a while ago in which he memorably describes the government’s promotion of CBT as a cure all for society’s unhappiness as a ‘triumph of a market driven view of the human psyche.’…

To the Bath literature festival earlier this week, to speak with Roma Tearne, author of two vivid, wonderfully told and swift moving novels about both her native Sri Lanka and life as a recent immigrant in Britain, to which she came, aged ten, fleeing the civil war in her country.

I am at the festival talking about ‘One Of Us’ and the first question that fellow writer Chair Jenni Mills puts to us is this: are the political novels of men and women different and if so in what way?

I am glad she gave me – five minutes – notice of this, my first question of the event, as my mind is already swirling with disparate thoughts.

Of course there isn’t a straightforward answer; for a start there are so many different kinds of political novels and political writers. But one thing that occurs to me is how much male political novelists – be it Trollope or Tolstoy or Jean Paul Sartre or Philip Roth – and for some reason I’m completely stuck for names of more contemporary male novelists, except David Peace whom I can’t speak about because I haven’t yet read any of his books! – write about feelings and families and all that traditional girly stuff; in other words, it’s interesting how much of a female sensibility male writers actually have. Yes, the more traditional thriller writers stick to plots, cabals, car crashes, poisoning and the rest but the most interesting of the male writers, in a political genre, will tackle, often most elegantly, the emotions and the emotional structure underpinning social or political institutions, write of these with a very keen eye.

So, just an observation – it’s hot up on that stage! – followed by a second thought: that the most accomplished of the women political writers ( again, in the very broadest sense) like Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer can convey the political feel of an era or place with matchless ease. Anyone who wants to understand the European left of the fifties and sixties, or South Africa before or after the end of apartheid, need only turn to the novels of these women to get a sense of the ideas and arguments and conflicts of their time.

Does this mean there is no difference? No, I think there is but where and in what way does it lie? A differing emphasis perhaps on the relative place of the personal and the political?…