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.