«I still think of this film as a ghost film». Bernardo Bertolucci repeated this to the screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, in his home, while imagining the story of a man and a woman who live in the same apartment without actually crossing paths, perhaps without even knowing fully about each other.
On the other hand, those who know his work know how much Bertolucci has always transformed cinema into a form of oblique autobiography: even when he seemed to tell something else, he inevitably ended up telling himself. So The Echo Chamber, presented in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival and directed by Andrea Pallaoro, is truly a work inhabited by presences. And among all the ghosts that pass through its rooms, the most visible is himself, Bernardo Bertolucci, who passed away in November 2018 while the script was still being worked on.
A text that remained suspended for years and was then taken up again by Pallaoro as one returns, on tiptoe, to a much loved and suddenly lost home.
And this is one of the most fascinating intuitions of the film: here the echo does not serve to confuse, but to reveal.
The Echo Chamber investigates what we do to fill the abyss that devours us, the addictions we cannot free ourselves from, the rituals with which we try to give shape to pain. It is a mysterious, elliptical feature film, which entrusts the viewer with the task of recomposing the puzzle.
Pallaoro, similar to an entomologist of feeling, does not explain: he observes. The camera does not judge, it dilates time, folds it back on itself, transforms it into suspended matter. The meaning is never openly declared, but emerges from fragmented gestures, silences, iterations, objects moved a few centimeters, glances that never allow real resolution.
The performers themselves seem to move within the film with a few cardinal points, following a route to be found by groping in the dark. And darkness, of course, is not a detail.
Because the real protagonist of The Echo Chamber is perhaps precisely the dichotomy between soul and body.
Leo, to whom Luca Marinelli lends a painful and nervous physicality, is torn apart in his body by the pain in his spine and devastated in his soul by the absence of meaning in the world.
And here we must honor the work of the screenwriters, which keeps us light years away from the common cliché of the stupid and toxic artist. At the beginning, when we see Leo pulling white lines, turning up the music to an almost unbearable volume and going wild dancing, we are immediately led to think of cocaine, a substance that is cinematically inflated almost as much as guns in noirs.
Instead, they are analgesic opiates, used to soothe actual physical suffering.
It is a detail that turns our gaze upside down and warns us of the ease with which we can mistake a desperate escape from pain for vice. Leo is not a hedonist, therefore, but a man looking for relief. Maybe a liberation. Maybe just a few minutes of silence inside your body.
In The Echo Chamber even objects are at the same time a refuge and a prison, a perennial interweaving of absence and presence.
A cup, a pillow, a toothbrush, a forgotten scarf, a moved ashtray: everything ends up becoming the language of the characters, traces of bodies that have touched each other and then lost.
It is that "absence, more acute presence" evoked by Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo's poet father, which seems to hover over many frames. And if a broken cup can be repaired, perhaps, with the same patience, a soul could also be mended.
The film gives us this question without ever flattering us with an answer.
The London apartment is much more than just a location: it is a character. A place of memory and surveillance, both refuge and emotional prison, architecture of desire, control and obsession. A house that, like its tenants, breathes and holds its breath.
Then there's Ava May. And there is Susan Sarandon to give her voice, body and that iconic stature that no longer needs to be demonstrated.
Its presence does not function as a simple soundtrack, but as a fragmented and disturbing memory that returns in altered forms, precisely like an echo.
The original songs are by Clément Ducol with lyrics by Émilie Gassin and some of the most evocative scenes are precisely those between Marinelli and Sarandon, especially when the film calls into question the famous thought of Henry James from The Middle Years: we work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have; doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.
They were words that Bertolucci returned to while working on the screenplay. And it is no small detail that in the film the process of recording a record seems to mirror that of the creation of a cinematographic work: trials, errors, obsessions, attempts to capture something that, at the very moment it takes shape, already seems to escape.
It goes without saying, the real question that the feature film whispers is almost metaphysical: what, ultimately, is the opposite of music.
So we come to Anne, played by Alicia Vikander.
For Leo he is an angel. But it is Leo himself who confesses that he doesn't know if he really likes angels, and a good part of the film is already contained in that hesitation.
Anne enters his life as a caring and manipulative ghost, both protective and destabilizing. Its silent intrusions are care and control, intimacy and invasion, comfort and obsession.
There are really no good or bad guys. Rather, there are individuals trapped in the choreography of addiction, where the boundaries between love and possession, presence and absence, slowly dissolve like sugar in water.
Beyond the elliptical plot, The Echo Chamber thus addresses a universal condition: the way in which we continue to cling to the very thing that prevents us from moving forward.
Like an echo, the wounds, the desires, the addictions return: changed, deformed, yet still recognisable.
It is quite impressive to think that all this stems from the last screenplay on which one of the greatest Italian authors worked, filtered by the sensitivity of Andrea Pallaoro, who with Medeas, Hannah and Monica had already educated us in a cinema of faces, silences and slow catharsis.
So no explanation.
Only the echo.
And we have the task, Bertoluccians to the core, of listening to it.
