Me and You

Bertolucci’s Me and You traces the hero Lorenzo’s (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) change from his first appearance to the last. In the first we see only his mass of snaky black hair until he briefly raises his pimpled, bitter, angry face. He’s at a session with a psychiatrist, considering what’s “normal” when he apparently abandoned a friend who needed his help. In the freeze frame that closes the film Lorenzo is smiling, exuberant, and his skin seems to have started clearing up. 

In between the 14-year-old has connected to his addict half-sister Olivia (Tea Falco) and helped her go cold turkey. He makes her promise to stay off drugs. She makes him promise to stop hiding from life. Though she buys some hash after making that promise, she doesn’t use it. In any case it’s not her earlier heroin. Like epic heroes Olivia and Lorenzo both journey through the  basement underworld, surviving that hell to emerge renewed and empowered

Perhaps the year’s least appealing film hero, Lorenzo is an absolute loner. He has the worst skin and loneliest mien in his school. The students know to ignore him; one corrects the girl who invites him to do a joint. He rushes out of class against the students’ current. He tells his mother he’s going on the school skiing trip but instead holes up in his parents’ basement storage locker. When his manic half sister joins him there they move from antagonism to understanding and mutual support.

They had no contact since she threw a stone at his mother, for stealing the girl’s father. Their father is remote from both, buying her off with drug money and him with a snowboard. The two troubled youth reflect the anomie, corruption and lack of principle and opportunity in modern Italy. They’re not just from a broken home but in a broken country. Where Lorenzo buries himself in his unfortunate appearance Olivia began a career of photographing herself in staged situations (Cindy Sherman sans prosthetics) till drugs hardened her and she froze out the feelings and confidence she needed for art.

In his first film in 10 years the 73-year-old Bertolucci brings astonishing clarity and understanding to the plight of a contemporary adolescent. The boy’s misadventures and the freeze frame end invite comparison to Truffaut’s memoir, The 400 Blows. Despite the seamier story and uglier hero Bertolucci still manages a more hopeful ending. Lorenzo has a close, loving relationship with his dying grandmother, who craves to hear his stories and is unperturbed to wake in the middle of the night to find him swiping her sleeping pills for Olivia. That scene coheres with the aging Bertolucci’s embrace of his troubled lad. 

Bertolucci teases us with echoes of his earlier work. The opaque glass over the mother’s phone call recalls a similar shot in Last Tango in Paris. Lorenzo’s speculation about incest with his mother and our expectation of incest with his half sister evoke Luna and The Dreamers respectively. But Bertolucci doesn’t go there. Instead he stays focused on a tormented isolated boy who doesn’t know what normal is -- other than it’s not him.  

The pet shop scene shows Lorenzo identifying with the chameleon and shape shifting twig insects, with the hard-shelled scurrying armadillo, and finally buying an ant colony in which he can detached watch a society at work. That for this outsider would be “normal.” As Olivia accidentally smashes the ant colony she breaks him out of his removed observer’s stance and urges him to engage with the world.

For his basement solitude Lorenzo stocks up on music and semi-junk food. He will live on nutella sandwiches and coke, with a nod to pear juice. As he lies in bed listening to hardrock on his earphones his body heaves in ecstatic throes, a loner trying to figure out what to do with his energy, in a parody of solitary orgasm. Olivia advances him to their waltz to David Bowie’s Italian song.

The title -- Me and You -- echoes through the film. Lorenzo’s mother says it on the phone to his father, summarizing their exclusion from his confidence. Olivia uses it to express their connection. Perhaps Bertolucci uses it to share with us his memory or sense of the “normal” adolescent agonies. Like the film the title is an old master’s embrace of the afflicted.  
     [June/14: What I didn't k ow when I wrote this was that Bertolucci had been confined to a wheelchair after surgery for the last 10 years. That makes this film's sense of restriction all the more personal and deeply felt.]