The Echo Chamber

When physical therapist Anne (Alicia Vikander) starts making house calls to treat successful music producer Leo’s (Luca Marinelli) chronic pain, the two are inexorably drawn into an unlikely affair. As the months pass, the lovers endure an endless cycle of longing and separation, intimacy and distance. Enter Ava (Susan Sarandon), a storied songstress collaborating with Leo, whose voice echoes through Leo’s apartment, a “choral” reminder of what is important, what is remembered, and what endures.

Working for the first time from a script not completely his own, director Andrea Pallaoro closely collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci’s co-writers Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi to adapt Bertolucci’s last screenplay. Set almost entirely within the walls of Leo’s labyrinthine, light-filled home, the film moves back and forth in time as characters drift in and out of each other’s lives. The Echo Chamber is a love story in a liminal space where the boundaries between presence and absence, care and dependence, desire and control merge and dissolve.