Isolation Spells Frustration In Bertolucci's 'Me And You'
In his five decades as a director, Bernardo Bertolucci has tended toward grand political filmmaking. His movies have generally been set in turbulent times: the rise of fascism in Italy in The Conformist and 1900, the leftist youth movements of the 1960s in Partner and Before the Revolution, the years prior to the Chinese Communist revolution in The Last Emperor — moments when social orders are being overturned.
But another foundational theme of Bertolucci's work has been wealth. His characters are often firmly upper class. More than many artists, Bertolucci has repeatedly explored the ethics of privilege: the question of how to behave in a world where, by virtue of birth, you've been destined to benefit from an unjust status quo. And so, while there are no revolutions underway in Me and You, the conspicuous backdrop of wealth marks it as a Bertolucci film, albeit an abnormally bland one for the great director.
Me and You is Bertolucci's first film in ten years, in part because ongoing health issues that now require him to use a wheelchair led him to doubt for some time that he would work again. It shares most in common with his 1972 classic Last Tango in Paris and 2003's The Dreamers. Like those two films, Me and You focuses on a small group of characters, in this case the 14-year-old Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), a bratty teen for whom other humans are, at best, a nuisance, and his older drug-addicted half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco).
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