Family dynamics tend to sit uncomfortably in films by Bernardo Bertolucci. There was the incestuous relationship in The Dreamers, set against a backdrop of political combustion in '68 Paris...
Who? Family dynamics tend to sit uncomfortably in films by Bernardo Bertolucci. There was the incestuous relationship in The Dreamers, set against a backdrop of political combustion in '68 Paris; and incest appears in one of his very first films, 1964’s Before The Revolution, where his protagonist has an affair with his wildly needy aunt.
"Family dynamics tend to sit uncomfortably in films by Bernardo Bertolucci."
What? Me and You, Bertolucci’s latest film, and his first for nine years, centres on siblings within a bourgeois setting and, while the possibility of darkness lurks at the edges of this contained film, what unfolds is a sweet and poignant getting-to-know-you-tale. The premise is simple if also implausible: lonely school boy Lorenzo tells his mother he is going on a school ski trip when in fact he plans to spend the week in the dingy but strangely expansive basement beneath the family apartment. His plans are ruined when his volatile stepsister Olivia crashes into the picture and decides to stay with him for the week to go cold-turkey from heroin addiction.
Why? Bertolucci, who is himself confined to a wheelchair following a fall several years ago, wanted to make a film where an emotional journey could take place in close quarters. And indeed, as the film progresses and the siblings grow closer, the basement seems to open up, yielding new spaces and possibilities for their budding friendship. There are lovely touches, including the siblings dancing to the Italian version of Bowie’s Space Oddity, which seems to have nothing to do with space and is rather a cri de coeur for a “poor lonely guy.” The ending is straight out of Les 400 Coups, but it’s undeniably uplifting, and thankfully the pair manage to get out of that basement with their innocence intact – in the case of Lorenzo – and, one hopes, restored for the troubled Olivia.
Text by Laura Allsop
