Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, Me and You, may not rank among his greatest. But a serious back injury had put the director out of action for the best part of eight years; he has even said he feared he would never work again. Now, confined to a wheelchair but in all other respects back to his old self, he has returned with his first film since 2003’s The Dreamers. Me and You is a minor work in the director’s unofficial and sporadic two-hotheads-in-a-room series. This has so far included pictures such as Last Tango in Paris and the tender, underrated Besieged. (The Dreamers, adapted from the late Gilbert Adair’s novel about May 1968, The Holy Innocents, is disqualified from inclusion by virtue of being about three hotheads in a room.)
In the new film, 14-year-old Lorenzo (played by Jacopo Olmo Antinori, who resembles a young Denis Lavant and has a fascinating face like an acne-studded trowel) hides out in the basement of his family’s home while his mother thinks he is on a skiing trip. Joining him is his half-sister, 25-year-old Olivia (Tea Falco), a heroin addict who is going cold turkey, albeit in a rather pretty fashion.
The scenario calls to mind the superior Mexican drama I’m Gonna Explode, in which two young lovers on the run turned out not to be on the run at all, but hiding out rather closer to home. Like that film, Me and You is indebted to the French New Wave—it even ends on a 400 Blows-style freeze frame of its impish hero—and hopelessly in love with its restless, aimlessly rebellious protagonists. After some playful early scenes, in which Lorenzo taunts his mother with fantasies of incest (recalling Bertolucci’s 1979 La Luna, which envisaged just such a taboo relationship), the film becomes bogged down in the basement. Lorenzo and Olivia need to be tested and challenged by the world around them, and left to their own devices they descend into solipsism.
However, Bertolucci’s fascination with them sees the film through. He finds their youthful potential palpably inspiring, as he did with Liv Tyler in the excellent late work Stealing Beauty (this is one director who never really experienced a sharp falling-off in quality). And his use of music (including The Cure and David Bowie) to express Lorenzo’s vitality is especially accomplished, as is his habit of modulating the sound to control our relationship with Lorenzo, so that sometimes we are inside the songs he is listening to on his headphones, while at other times we are excluded from them. Bertolucci’s investment in his characters, the way you can feel him rooting for them, can be invigorating in itself, even when there’s not much happening on screen. In common with Jonathan Demme or the late Eric Rohmer, his compassion is an inseparable part of his cinematic voice. Thank goodness he’s back.
Me and You is on release.
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