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“The Echo Chamber” arrives in competition for Italy at the Venice Film Festival, the new film by Andrea Pallaoro based on the last screenplay written shortly before his death by Bernardo Bertolucci with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. We thus find ourselves, in true Bertolucci style, in an apartment film (like Last Tango in Paris) and, at the same time, in a ghost story with Leo (Luca Marinelli), a restless music producer, cocaine addict and unresolved artist, and Anne (Alicia Vikander), a young physiotherapist who treats his back and, with her love, also his anguish. Finally, there’s Ava (Susan Sarandon), a big song star who frequents the apartment for her unexpected latest album Testament. The film will be distributed in Italy by 01 Distribution from 10 September.
«Inheriting a screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci is certainly a great responsibility, even if its themes are very close to my vision of the individual, the couple and the nuances of love», underlines the director.
Instead, Susan Sarandon says: «As for my character, I see Ava as a person who is in a very particular and delicate moment in her life. After losing her partner she practically finds herself entering a new world that she doesn’t know and then I love the script when she says to Leo: I will never undress in front of anyone else, because having been with him for many years, another person would only see an old woman, an elderly woman.”
For Alicia Vikander «it was possible to make the character of Anne credible only by referring to my personal experiences, to my very personal love stories». And again the actress underlines: «The London apartment where the film takes place is not a simple set, but a character within the film, a place of memory but also of control», where everyday objects, a cup, a pillow, a toothbrush, become «an architecture of desire, need and control».
The musical scenes of the composer Clément Ducol represent for Marinelli an element of glue between the characters, while Vikander admits her difficulty in singing for the first time: «I don’t sing, I felt incredibly vulnerable».
Marinelli also shares a personal memory of the work with the two authoritative colleagues, quoting Eduardo De Filippo: «I missed the joke to listen to it». And this is to describe his emotion, how enraptured he was observing their creative process.
Sarandon once again takes the opportunity to talk about his public commitment in support of the Palestinian cause, the boycott he has suffered for this reason for years (“There are still films that are not offered to me, with agencies telling directors not to give me a role”), the importance of festivals for politics (“I don’t think that the genocide in Palestine ceases because it is talked about here in Venice, but I believe that a film can represent a challenge, it can question the status quo”) and the accusations of Anti-Semitism rained down on Mark Ruffalo for his criticism of the merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery: «He was attacked not for being anti-Semitic or not, but for the information he spread about the possible harm that the merger could cause to people».
May el-Toukhy: «Few female directors at the Lido? Structural problem”
Also in Venice is the only film among the 21 competing for the Golden Lion directed by a woman, namely the Danish director of Egyptian origin May el-Toukhy who brings Woman Unknown to the Lido. It is the dramatic story of a maid and young housekeeper, Marie (an extraordinary Mathilde Arcel), who is about to marry the rich, elderly widower she works for, Christian. We are in post-war Denmark. The woman, however, keeps a secret: during the Second World War she had a relationship with a German soldier and her past threatens to come back to take her toll. She is thus forced to do everything in her power to preserve her new status as mistress of the house in the post-war chaos. The film will be distributed in Italy by Lucky Red.
«It all started – says the director at the Lido – from a photo reprinted by a Danish newspaper with a woman sitting on a bench with her clothes torn. There was something pornographic about that photo and he also had a swastika painted on his back. So we started doing some research and discovered that these photos were a warning to women to use their bodies well. I immediately felt the opportunity to tell this story.”
The research on this topic also involved the lead actress Arcel: «I had a lot of time to research the stories of these women, some still alive, and often still persecuted. One thing that was really very important for me was this study because it gave me the opportunity to do good work for my character. When you know the material you will be working with well, you can also allow yourself to improvise and better understand what really happens between the various characters.” «The heart of the film? It is the woman’s body as a battlefield as part of the national territory” explains May el-Toukhy.
Why is she the only female filmmaker competing in Venice? «I think it’s a structural problem that I, among other things, have encountered throughout my career. I often had difficulty making my films. After completing my studies it took 6-7 years to create my first work and this did not happen to my male companions. And then what about the budget? We, as directors, have a different, much lower budget available, something that also affects the actors who want to work with us.”