The Echo Chamber

Immaculately filmed and emotionally precise, Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro’s addiction and relationship drama is shaping up to be something special until it unleashes a plot development so silly, it got big laughs in my screening – and not the good kind. It’s like watching a waiter nimbly carry a salver of champagne flutes through a crowded apartment before tripping over the cat and falling out the window. 

It’s a major shame because there’s so much to love in Pallaoro’s careful handling of Bernardo Bertolucci’s screenplay – the last by the Italian auteur before his death in 2018, co-written with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi.

Martin Eden’s Luca Marinelli is superb as Leo, a successful, charming but emotionally distant music producer whose life is being made intolerable by chronic back pain. He needs a solution so he can continue to work with Ava, a legendary folk singer he’s successfully lured out of self-exile. She’s played by Susan Sarandon as a husky, all-seeing Marianne Faithfull type and it’s her best role in years.

The three-hander is completed by Alicia Vikander as Anne, the doctor who treats Leo in the bedroom of his elegant apartment (is it London? Is it Rome? It’s kept oblique but we never leave it). She falls under the Italian’s spell, and is soon dispensing off-the-books opioids to help him blur out the pain. Their relationship turns co-dependent: Anne is lovesick; Leo is mostly dope sick. Ava, meanwhile, is torn between embracing the alchemy with her talented producer and sensing that he’s teetering on the edge.

It unleashes a plot development so silly, it got laughs in my screening

Pallaoro cleverly chops up the chronology, opening with Leo overdosing, skipping forward to his return from rehab, before darting back to Anne’s arrival in his life. Then forward again to find Anne regularly creeping into his flat while he’s out working at the studio. She watches him leave in the morning – a recurring shot of him getting into his Jaguar XJS (probably not a great choice for the back) in the street below will become significant – and sleeps on his bed, full of longing and, presumably, full of guilt. Their relationship, we’re led to assume, ended because she was too closely associated with his old dependence.

I loved The Echo Chamber’s evocation of loss and loneliness – how a familiar space can carry the memories and energy of a love affair that’s hard to let go of – and its treatment of how a need for control can spill out of emotional anxiety. Vikander, unlocking those themes with her fragile, conflicted performance, is lit like a Vermeer by cinematographer Diego Garçia. Marinelli fizzes, too. Then comes that misjudged moment and all that champagne crashes to the floor. 

The Echo Chamber premiered at the Venice Film Festival.