At one point in
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me and You, the turbulent Olivia muses about
Buddhism, about being able to transcend one’s confining point of view and achieve
an elevating objectivity, an aspiration denied within the film if only by the
extreme specificity of the situation: the teenage Lorenzo, given money by his
mother to attend a school ski trip, instead spends it on an ant farm and a week’s
supply of food and holes up in a room in the building basement, eventually
joined by Olivia, an older half-sister who needs a place to go cold turkey. The
film has a predictably redemptive arc – he makes her promise not to take drugs
again, she makes him promise to stop hiding and live a fuller life – but there’s
no particular reason to think either commitment will be kept, the film being
more possessed by the allure of stubborn denial and self-indulgence than by resistance
to it. Bertolucci explores the possibilities of the space with practiced ease,
but Lorenzo’s withdrawal (juxtaposed against a poor little armadillo he sees
early on in a pet store, endlessly doing figure eights around its tiny cage)
mirrors that of the director’s own: this is yet another late film (after Stealing
Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers) set predominantly at a bourgeois remove
from the messy external world. Even at her young age, Olivia is an artist who’s
already had some exhibitions, with at least a few moneyed contacts; the
basement space far exceeds in volume and the included trappings what anyone
would likely be able to access for such a purpose; etc. etc. The film lands
then primarily as peculiar fantasy, an impression bolstered by the prominent use
of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in the closing stretches; typical though
of of Bertolucci’s facility for expanding and ventilating even small cinematic
gestures, the familiar version is preceded by an Italian-language one, the lyrics
of which seem to be in no way a direct translation of the original.
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