Me and You another piece of Bertolucci gold

It's been nearly a full decade since Italy's maestro of the cinema brought a new film to the big screens. One must first assume that it would be a special story that would bring Bernardo Bertolucci back to the director's chair. Me and You (a.k.a. Io e Te) is indeed that story, one vastly unlike The Last Emperor or Last Tango in Paris, but slightly more akin to Stealing Beauty.

Me and You is a simple and small movie about family relationships, growing up and finding one's own place in the world.

Me and You features Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), a 14-year-old boy who lives with his overbearing mother. The teenaged loner isn't quite satisfied with how things are working out and we see that he has some psychological or emotional issues. At the start of the film, he's in the middle of a session with his therapist. Even he seems not fully engaged with that process.

One week he is meant to go on a ski trip with a school group but takes the money that was meant for his registration and buys himself seven days' worth of food so that he can live in the basement of his building. There's an old storage room filled with discarded furniture and boxes.

It's his perfect hideaway, that is at least until his 25-year-old half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco), drops in unexpectedly. She's a heroin junkie trying to quit cold turkey and doesn't have anywhere else to go to crash. It's less than ideal for either of them. It's not all pleasant and there are many factors that could plausibly spoil it all totally but somehow they have to figure it out as best as they can.

This is one of those gorgeous and small human dramas about the tricky and delicate nature of our relationships with each other. It's an otherwise brief film as well, clocking in at just over 90 minutes, but its languid pace makes it seem longer. There's nothing wrong with that, though, because our attention is rapt, so much so that the audience harbours a desire to be the protagonist. Who hasn't wanted to be a “not quite” adult who escapes the faulty and foolish people we call our parents?

Bertolucci has a deft hand for this material, probably something he picked up from Pier Paolo Pasolini in his early days. He has a painterly esthetic for his images and a romantic heart for his characters. Cinephiles can always count on him for a visual feast and soul-stirring delight every time he gets behind the camera, and this is no exception.

Clarification

The review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film Me and You in the July 23 edition of the Gazette mistakenly contained two sentences that were copied and pasted from a plot summary written by Yurrit Avonds and published on the film’s page at www.imdb.com.
It was Gazette writer Scott Hayes’ intent to use these words as a guide when writing his story. It was not his intent to publish the words as his own.
Hayes and the Gazette wish to apologize to readers and Avonds for the error.