Mystery, addiction and the stain of scandal: Can this film rescue Bertolucci?

Everyone has a past, says Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, but when it comes to the character she plays in a new film from the mind of Bernardo Bertolucci, it’s impossible to guess what that might be. The Echo Chamber was the screenplay the Italian maestro – best known for classics such as The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1976) – was working on when he died in 2018 at the age of 77.

The film hinges on the desperation of a man ravaged by back pain and the drugs he takes to make it bearable (Bertolucci was himself in a wheelchair for the last 15 years of his life following an unsuccessful operation on his spine).

It is set entirely in a magnificent old apartment, purportedly in London but fairly obviously, given what we see from the window, in Rome. The man in pain is Leo, an innovative and clearly very successful music producer played by Luca Martinelli. Vikander plays Anne, a physiotherapist who meets Leo for the first time on a house call (which certainly puts it in the realm of fantasy) to relieve his acute back pain. She also prescribes opiates and, on subsequent visits, slips into an ambiguous role where she is both lover and enabler; Leo, as it turns out, is a born addict.

As viewers, we know nothing about Anne. She doesn’t even seem to live anywhere. “I think that is the mystery,” Vikander says. “I wanted to portray that feeling, that whatever you want to read into any of the little clues she gives, it will give you the idea of a past, because everyone has one.” So mysterious is she that you may wonder whether, in the fictional universe of this film, she even exists. “Whoa!” gasps Vikander; they hadn’t thought of that.

Meanwhile, Leo has another love story, albeit a platonic one, with Eva, a celebrated singer he has lured out of retirement to make an album with him, played with considerable brio by 80-year-old Susan Sarandon. Eva has been around the block more than once. She has some stories; she can also see exactly what is happening to her younger friend.

The Echo Chamber is directed by the much admired younger Italian director Andrea Pallaoro from a script co-written by Bertolucci and two other writers, Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. Following Bertolucci’s death, Pallaoro collaborated with the same writers to hone and sharpen the script. In the process, he has made it his own, but its concerns are recognisably those of the old maestro: the creation of art, sexual obsession, control within relationships and the corrosive effect of physical pain.

With just three characters in a single space, filming was clearly an intimate experience. How much did they think about Bertolucci? “Obviously the history of Bertolucci beginning the journey or creating the story was a nice element to have,” says Vikander. It also fitted the themes of the film “which talks about the dreams and experiences of life that reverberate within these few rooms”. When they were filming, however, the actors were more immediately intent on working with Pallaoro’s distinctive style.

“He very often has just one or two set-ups, which is true in this film. It’s more challenging because you know he’s not going to cut around as much. A lot of our scenes were one shot. It was a bit more like stage work, with the camera and crew a long way away.”

Bertolucci’s star has declined in recent years to the point where his early masterpieces are barely seen, although a new seven-hour documentary about his work by Luca Guadagnino, shown at the most recent Venice Film Festival, may well turn his posthumous fortunes around. Bertolucci was working to the very end, but it feels as if he is part of a distant past. Why he faded from fame so rapidly can be blamed on a few factors.

Chief among them, certainly, is the grim testimony of Maria Schneider about her treatment by the director and his star, Marlon Brando, during the making of Last Tango in Paris, which emerged and was much discussed at the height of the MeToo movement. His later films, moreover, were largely rather dated chamber pieces. Guadagnino’s documentary, Joie de Vivre, which is both fascinating and characteristically idiosyncratic, passes over them, concentrating on the great early works. He knows what he likes – and he knows what we should like, too.

At a press conference in Venice, Sarandon said she had lost several roles in Hollywood because of her public stance against Israeli actions in Gaza and was more welcomed internationally by productions like this one. It was also unlike any Hollywood production as a workplace.

“There were no trailers, no escape, we were all thrown together in this world,” she says. She refers to the film’s very European sensibility, which “creates a lot of atmosphere and tells the story not just by the words but by the images. Andrea takes the time to tell the story without talking down to the audience, not explaining everything, trusting the blurring of the lines between past and present, memory and dreams.”

The film had a warm critical response, particularly from the Italian press, which may help to direct a new generation to Bertolucci’s mightier works. Not that it is a Bertolucci film, for all that it shares the DNA of those late films such as Besieged.

“I was very aware of inheriting a screenplay from a filmmaker whose voice and role in the history of cinema has been so meaningful,” says Pallaoro. “It comes with a great sense of responsibility – not a responsibility to imitate, but quite the opposite.” He had to make it his own. “And I feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to do so.”

The Echo Chamber closes this year’s Italian Film Festival, which runs until October 14 in Sydney and October 17 in Melbourne.

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