Bertolucci’s Last Screenplay Finally Reaches the Screen: Pallaoro’s ‘The Echo Chamber’ Premieres in Venice
Andrea Pallaoro adapts Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay into an intimate drama about addiction, care and manipulation in a single apartment.
- Director Andrea Pallaoro's 'The Echo Chamber', set in a London apartment, explores a fraught relationship between music producer Leonardo and doctor Anne, based on a screenplay by the late Bernardo Bertolucci.
- Following Leonardo's chronic back pain and opioid use, Anne—who initially provided the medication—secretly visits his apartment while he is away, leaving subtle markers of her presence.
- Susan Sarandon, playing music icon Ava May, emerges as the film's most engaging character while recording an album of 'spooky, smoky, twilight torch ballads' with Leonardo, offering sharp contrast to the couple's secretive dynamic.
- Shot by Diego Garcia in rich Academy-ratio frames, the film is visually stunning; Pallaoro's direction shows 'sensitivity and restraint,' though critics argue it suffers from an overstretched runtime and late-act melodrama.
- Although the concept of an apartment as a 'go-between' nourishing love is poetic, 'The Echo Chamber' struggles to expand on its protagonists' inner worlds, failing to explore the relationship's depth beyond its walls.
17 Articles
17 Articles
Caged, unhappy and paralyzed. In the Competition of Venice 83 it is all a matter of apartments. After the "room of sex" in "Successer" this night by Nanni Moretti, here is "The Echo chamber" by Andrea Pallaoro, another house of desire, another space radically limited and rigorously by the look of direction. L'articolo Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander miserable lovers in the apartment cage of desire in "The echo chamber." In Venice 83 Andrea Pa…
‘The Echo Chamber’ Review: Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon Deliver Slow-Burn Sparks in Challenging but Affecting Portrait of Art and Addiction
Director Andrea Pallaoro returns to the Venice competition with an intimate three-hander based on the final original screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci.
‘The Echo Chamber’ Review: Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander Are Sublime in a Brooding Addiction Romance Directed from Bertolucci’s Last Script
Venice: A tragic (and tragically handsome) Marinelli plays a drug-addicted music producer enmeshed in Vikander's codependent, unrequited care in Andrea Pallaoro's intimately sad feature. Susan Sarandon co-stars as a chain-smoking singer/songwriter.
‘The Echo Chamber’ Review: Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon Reverberate Through a Smoky, Somber Single-Location Love Story
If you’re ever thinking of attempting a single-location film, choose that location with care. Make it high-ceilinged, light-filled, book-lined, with a reading-nook conservatory area, a gargantuan sofa, a killer sound system and space enough that you don’t even have to turn sideways to sidle past the grand piano. If possible, have it overlook a neatly […]
Venice, 6 sets. (askanews) - "The Echo Chamber," the second Italian film in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, which will be in the cinemas from 10 September, is the story on which Bernardo Bertolucci worked before dying, and which also tells a lot about him. The screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi completed the story, directed by Andrea Pallaoro and played by Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon. The f…
The actress presents in Venice ‘The Echo Chamber’, which adapts last screenplay by filmmaker Bernardo Bertoluci after several vetoes for denouncing “the genocide in Gaza”
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