In a sequence from The Echo Chamber, the film that the Italian Andrea Pallaoro has presented in Venice with the latest script by Bernardo Bertolucci and the performances of Susan Sarandon, Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander, the moony voice of a twilight Marianne Faithfull singing Crazy Love plays in the background. It is a distant but important detail, because, in some way, throughout the film (whose themes are interpreted by Sarandon herself) you can feel that already faded and broken voice and what it transmitted: the possibility of converting suffering into a creative source. The Echo Chamber is a work about pain, love and its dependence, which takes place entirely in a beautiful London apartment where an addicted and tortured music producer (Marinelli) experiences a series of encounters with two women: a surviving rocker (Sarandon) and a nurse (Vikander) whose care opens the door to a crazy, ghostly and shadowy love.
Bertolucci began writing it in 2017, together with screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. It was an “extremely personal” project, the testamentary work of the author of Novecento. The starting point was to tell the story of a couple who lives in the same house but never meets. After months of work, with the first draft of the script already finished, Bertolucci's death in November 2018 left the film orphaned. Until he found his director in Andrea Pallaoro, who already demonstrated his sense of ellipsis and off-screen in his film Hannah, with Charlotte Rampling. Now, he takes the dialogue that the film establishes with the legendary Italian filmmaker into his own territory.
The Echo Chamber knows how to move with subtlety through the mysterious love triangle it proposes; On the one hand there is that older, wiser woman played by Sarandon; Also, the two young lovers, lost and condemned not to meet, played by Marinelli and Vikander. And then there is the house itself where everything happens, a wordless space that, through doors, mirrors and glass, moves through time and the loneliness of its characters.
“I discovered Bertolucci with The Conformist, he left me completely stunned because I had no political awareness at the time and those films were not made in the United States,” the American actress recalled this Sunday in her press conference. "Later we became very friends, I met him thanks to Louis Malle and discovered a charming man, very funny. When we shot this film, all of us stuck in that apartment, trusting so much in the viewer's ability to understand what is not explained, I thought a lot about Bernardo's films and for some reason I thought again about The Conformist."
This Sunday's day was one of the best to date on the Lido. Also screened was Woman Unknown, one of the two films in this year's competition by a woman, in this case the Danish Egyptian May el-Toukhy. It is a very sober and accomplished drama about the hunt, fear and guilt of female collaborators after the Second World War, and the humiliating public punishments to which they were subjected if they had had any type of romantic relationship with the invading Germans. Its director explained the story was born from a photograph from 1942 in which she saw some naked and shaved women on the street with a swastika painted on their backs. These parades of shame took place throughout Europe, and May el-Toukhy stops at one story, that of a nanny who is about to get married, hiding her recent past.
Dark and distressing, with a great work of period setting and its main actress, Mathilde Arcel F., Woman Unknown raises the question of why countries forgave so many collaborationist companies but not the women who slept with Germans.
All in all, the film that most convinced this Sunday at La Mostra was that of the South Korean Lee Chang-Dong, who, after eight years away, premieres Possible Love, in which the director of the wonderful Burning considers the meaning of making films today through a work drama. In her film, she confronts two women and two worlds: a rich documentary filmmaker and the subject of her documentary, a union worker who experiences the disintegration of her workplace due to cuts and new technologies. This reconversion also drags her depressive husband, a colleague at the factory. The two women like each other and establish a friendship in which their lives and desires intersect. Also their partners. The South Korean raises questions about the present, the future of work and the place of cinema.
Possible Love reaches its climax in a surprising final stretch in which dissatisfaction, desire and family come together. “Throughout these years I have felt how our lives have transformed and changed drastically,” Lee Chang-dong said this Sunday at the Lido. “The Covid crisis made me reflect on how the relationship between human beings was profoundly mutating and that led me to ask myself a question: Can cinema continue to connect people?”
