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If you’re ever thinking of attempting a single-location film, choose that location with care. Make it high-ceilinged, light-filled, book-lined, with a reading-nook conservatory area, a gargantuan sofa, a killer sound
system and space enough that you don’t even have to turn sideways to sidle past the grand piano. If possible, have it overlook a neatly cobbled, colonnaded street where one can park one’s classic car. In short, make it the luscious London flat in which all of Andrea Pallaoro’s “The Echo Chamber” takes place. When Anne (Alicia Vikander), a doctor who does house calls, tells her patient Leonardo (Luca Marinelli), a music producer suffering from chronic lower back pain, “I really like your apartment. There’s so many interesting things to look at,” it signals the beginning of a tentatively passionate love story, that perhaps only a man as secure as Leonardo — who looks like Luca Marinelli — could be certain is directed at him, and not his highly desirable residence.
Of course, the idea that where you live is actually an extension of who you are — especially if one lives the kind of successful, worldly, creatively fulfilled life that Leo apparently does — is very central here. Based on the screenplay that Bernardo Bertolucci was writing with collaborators Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi at the time of his death in 2018, “The Echo Chamber’s” constraints actually come less from its single-location conceit than from its own limited interest in expanding on the inner worlds of its protagonists, beyond their endless involvement in their own fraught relationship. Not to say we’re not to some extent involved too: It is always nice to watch attractive people fall in love, and then run into the kind of obstacles that allow them to pine for each other in the most attractive of ways.
The film is certainly beautiful, shot in gorgeously rich Academy-ratio frames by Apichatpong, Reygadas and Refn collaborator Diego Garcia, who makes portraiture and still life out of every single closeup, and landscapes out of the different planes that can be achieved through the modular lighting and glass panels of Gaspare de Pascali’s exquisite production design. And, at least until a highly unnecessary eleventh-hour swerve into melodrama, it is directed with great sensitivity and restraint by Pallaoro, who has never once been guilty of overstatement across his three fine previous features: “Medeas,” “Monica” and “Hannah.”
But despite an enlivening turn from Susan Sarandon, playing a singing icon whom Leo has tempted out of semi-retirement to record an album of new songs, and despite Vikander and Marinelli playing off each other nicely, it does not fire the imagination beyond the confines of these four walls. (Actually maybe 10 or 12, given the workspace, bedroom, bathroom, etc.) Long before the end of its overstretched two-hours-plus, and certainly well before that overwrought final-act twist, it feels like we have put in rather too much time with this couple, and maybe we ought to just leave them to it.
Told in a flashback-and-forward structure, the film starts in the middle of the timeline, at the point of the relationship’s biggest crisis. Anne comes back to the apartment (the pair do not live together, though she has a key) to discover Leo, high on pain meds, sporting a wrist cast, leaping around the living room to deafening, noise-ordinance-defying music. Initially concerned, she cannot help but be infected by his contagious, if chemically-induced, good humor and they party for a bit. But later, she wakes up on top of him on the sofa and he will not wake up at all. She calls an ambulance.
Some months later he returns, presumably from a stint in rehab, and resumes his work with Ava May (Sarandon) — an album of spooky, smoky, twilight torch ballads, written by composer/lyricist team Clément Ducol and Émilie Gassin, and well-suited to the slight husk of Sarandon’s voice. But, associating Anne with his addiction — since she was the one who first, reluctantly, gave him opioids when his debilitating back pain proved resistant to any other treatment — and on the advice of his sponsor, he puts off contacting her. Anne takes to hovering nearby and letting herself into the apartment whenever he leaves. (It is never exactly clear how she comes to be sufficiently close by to be at the kitchen window in time to watch his car pull away.)
Inside she wanders around, initially furtively checking that Leo is not falling off the wagon, rummaging through cupboards, surreptitiously licking the edge of the credit card he used to cut his lines. But soon her visits have more emotional than practical purpose as, lovesick, she takes to sleeping in his bed, washing in his shower, and occasionally curling up on an armchair with one of his books. Usually, she is careful to cover her tracks, blow-drying the towel so its dampness does not give her away, plumping the sofa pillows back up just so. But at some point frustration begins to set in, and she begins to leave deliberate markers of her presence.
While it’s definitely true that what is romantic under certain circumstances can look at a lot stalking in others, “The Echo Chamber” is not the kind of film to probe such worldly distinctions. Leo remains unaware of Anne’s visits until she reveals them, at which point he responds in kind. And as love gestures go, getting a reclusive famous singer to re-record an early track of hers that Anne’s mother used to sing to her as child, is a pretty grand one, and when she lets herself in that day and realizes he has left it playing for her, Anne interprets it accordingly.
It’s almost a pity, as the idea of the apartment as the go-between — holding onto and nourishing the love between two people who cannot actually be together — is undeniably poetic, and we could have spent a little more time exploring it, and a little less on the rather repetitive sneaking-around phase. And indeed, we could have used a little more Ava May, given that it’s her muse-like friendship with Leo that is the more unusual, and in some ways more touching, love story here. Ava May’s words of wisdom, about love and regret and a life apparently thoroughly hard-lived, make her the most inherently interesting character of the three, and also the most enjoyably catty. “You’re right, that Anne of yours really is an angel,” she tells Leo at one point, stubbing out her cigarette on the windowsill. “Of course, I don’t know that I really like angels.”
