Grandiose Sense of Cinema
Grandiose Sense of Cinema
Me and You
2/27/13
As its closing night
movie, Me and You brings a grandiose
sense of cinema to the Film Comment Selects
series at Lincoln Center.
“He
has a grandiose sense of self,” one character explains the anti-social behavior
of 14-year-old Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me
and You. Rumours have it that Bertolucci originally considered making a 3D
movie of this chamber piece—primarily set during the weeklong basement hideaway
of Lorenzo and his estranged older half-sister Olivia (Teo Falco). Movies such
as The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), The Conformist (1971), The
Sheltering Sky (1990), and Little Buddha (1994) make 3D redundant—and
insufficient—to Bertolucci’s unparalleled ability to make depth of field pop
like a storybook.
Bertolucci and cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti achieve tactile emotions
without 3D gimmicks. “Normal means normal. So nothing,” Lorenzo describes his
(lack of) feeling to a therapist in the opening of Me and You.
Immediately afterward, Lorenzo goes spiraling down a vertiginous staircase shot
at extreme low-angle punctuated by a signature perspectival shift to follow
Lorenzo out the door. Such existential perceptiveness—and delirious
expressiveness—matches that of silent films.
Yet Bertolucci fills the soundtrack with pop music. The sequence
features the diegetic (ear bud) sound of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”
Bertolucci’s lyrical, rhythmic images cry for Lorenzo, who turns inward from
the world through the music on his mp3 player. A long lens during the “Boys
Don’t Cry” sequence captures Lorenzo oblivious in the foreground while a woman
in the background loses control of her leashed dogs.
Lorenzo is not normal. Filled with misdirected feeling, he asks his
mother inappropriate (sexual) questions and explodes into tantrums when she
treats him like a child. At the center of these passions is a longing,
visualized in a low-angle point-of-view shot of Lorenzo’s dream of mother and
absent father dancing on a glass rooftop. The sequence reminds of Bertolucci’s Luna
(1979) with its movie theatre ceiling that opens up to the moon and stars when
its young protagonist, motivated by Oedipal desires for a missing father and
self-absorbed mother, loses his virginity during a heroin high.
Anti-social Lorenzo finds interacting with people so difficult that he
spends time at the pet shop observing the animals in their aquariums and
cages—in a sequence more amazing than anything in Avatar (2009). So a class trip to a ski
resort gives his mother hope for his son’s social future. It’s an uncanny
memory out of the adolescent collective unconscious made piquant by an image of
the enthusiastic mother seen and heard through the slats of light of a two-toned
frosted glass door.
Lorenzo takes advantage of the class trip to plan a week of privacy—just
him and his iPod, ant farm, and favorite junk food—in the storage room of his
parents’ apartment building. Then Olivia shows up. As made riveting by Antinori
and Falco, this brother-and-sister pair works through their family’s pain to
discover untapped capacity for compassion.
Bertolucci evokes compassion through intense magnification. Indeed,
another eye-popping trope includes Lorenzo scrutinizing with a magnifying glass
the ant farm—and then his sister as she kicks heroin. “They put me in a box,”
Olivia complains when she locates a valuable item in her father and
stepmother’s storage.
The effects of the broken family reflect in Lorenzo’s discovery of
Olivia’s photography—through which she creates the illusion of her head dislocated or of her body endowed with ambisexual appendages. Then, the story
that reveals the reason for Olivia’s estrangement from her father’s new family
shocks even Lorenzo. These familial insights fill with primal, dream-like suspense
a mesmerizing late-night raid (for food) into the parents’ apartment.
The focused space and timeframe of Me and You ultimately
magnifies the essence of love. Olivia’s junky withdrawals bring out the worst
in her—physical and emotional frailty. Yet that vulnerability ultimately draws
out Lorenzo’s tenderness: “I’m sorry I made you cry.”
Significantly, these two sibling oddities bond over “Ragazzo Solo,
Ragazza Sola,” Mogol's translation of David Bowie. Bertolucci reveals—as if for
the first time—the deep yearning of “Space Oddity.” Doing so restores pop
expression to the communal space. It provides an alternative to Lorenzo’s
escapism that makes manifest Internet, high-tech solipsism. After a decade,
Bertolucci triumphantly returns to cinema his grandiose sense of the Other.
posted by John Demetry at
8:31 PM
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