Music is a love story, an apartment in London filled with memories, and a couple who inhabit it, mostly without crossing paths. The echoes of The Echo Chamber, Bertolucci’s latest screenplay, became a film directed by Andrea Palloro, presented today in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Along with the director, the film’s stars spoke at the press conference: Luca Marinelli, Susan Sarandon, and Alicia Vikander, as well as the screenwriters who, together with Bertolucci, wrote this story, Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, who shared the genesis with us.
“Everything started at the end of 2017, when Bertolucci met with us to tell us about a spark from which he wanted to derive a film. The tale of a man and a woman who live in the same apartment but never meet, and perhaps don’t even know of each other’s existence. Then we took various paths for months, arriving at the end of 2018 at a second draft, only to learn of his death in November. With this directorless script, there remained in us the desire to bring to light this film with Indigo. Then, with Andrea Pallaoro we reopened the rooms of that house, and those themes resonated strongly in him, who ha saputo fare una storia molto personale partendo da una storia molto personale per un altro grande autore”.
The film centers on Leo (Luca Marinelli), a successful music producer with a drug dependency who shares a deep, stormy relationship with Anne (Alicia Vikander), a enigmatic physiotherapist. The two keep chasing one another, seeking, hurting, and losing themselves, unable to stay together and truly part. Meanwhile, Leo collaborates with Ava (Susan Sarandon) on her new album.
“Inheriting the final screenplay of a voice as legendary as his was a huge responsibility,” Pallaro stated, “but I understood right away that the way to honor his essence was to let it filter through my own sensibility and protect the vision of all the great artists who helped bring it to life. One of the main reasons I agreed was the awareness of the support I had from Bernardini and Rampoldi, who had written it with Bertolucci. It was fundamental for me. The themes are very close to me, such as the boundary between identity and the individual, the couple, and above all the different shades in a relationship of love, addiction and intimacy, but also the need for control and for caring for the other. I poured all my own love stories into it, because I believe that everything that happens to us transforms us, especially love stories. The director’s most important choice is the collaborators and artists with whom to create and bring a project like this to the big screen. I chose them on the basis of the immense respect and admiration I feel for them, but also for the inspiration they have given me with their performances over the years. They are all actors I deeply loved even before meeting them. We chose London as the setting. It was crucial to find an apartment that would not only have its own life and history but would reflect the characters’ inner world. It is a character in itself, a place of memory but also of control and surveillance, both a refuge and an emotional prison. A space that would amplify the relationship between presence and absence that the film expresses in gestures, traces, objects, such as a mug, a cushion, a toothbrush, a scarf. It would become an architecture of need and control.”
Susan Sarandon recalled how Hollywood and American politics are deeply intertwined with Israel and its government, and how people who took a stand in support of the Palestinian struggle have been marginalized, as happened to her. She also recalled Bertolucci personally, “with whom I became friends in the late 1970s when I was connected to Louis Malle. I remember the overwhelming feeling after seeing The Conformist. I didn’t know cinema could be like that, so different and with a greater awareness than American cinema. For The Echo Chamber we all inhabited this apartment, which became our universe from which we could not escape. A magical atmosphere was created, while Andrea took his time to tell the story, not explaining everything to the audience, trusting the nuances, the lines between past and present, memory and dreams. I found it hard to sing; I’m not a singer, but it was the music that built the relationship with Leo’s character. Yet everyone was patient, even though my singing required many adjustments.”
Speaking about his experience in the film, Luca Marinelli explained how he found “something to connect with, like all of us and I think like the audience will. A film that doesn’t explain but lets you live, not having too much information allows you to find a path with few reference points. The memory I carry with me is having worked with a group of immense artists, recalling a line from De Filippo that says ‘I missed the line to listen to it’ (I found myself watching Susan and Alicia in their processes). For me, it’s always incredibly enjoyable to work with music in a film. If I had the chance for another life, I would surely like to be a musician. It was a glue for us to see Susan working in this domain, and wonderful to do it together. A way for our characters to open up and to bare themselves even more than the other.”
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