“For me it was a return to life. I spent the last 10 years in a state of lethargy and I woke up the moment I accepted the fact that I am now talented in a different way. It’s not that in that moment it all became easy and clear, but I returned to life.” Confined to a wheelchair for a long time, Bernardo Bertolucci spoke about his health to the international press that had come to applaud him for his new film, Io e Te (Me and You).
For a director that made his last film 9 years ago, The Dreamers in May of 1968, and who thought that he’d never work again, returning to the Cannes that has applauded him many times before is a happy experience, despite arriving seated in a wheelchair because of declining health and chronic back problems.
The film, presented out of competition, is based on a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti and acted out in a claustrophobic basement by two young people playing step-siblings, Jacobi Olmo Antinori (Lorenzo), and Tea Falco (Olivia) who confront the worst problems of adolescence.
“For this story”, said Bertolucci, “it was love at first sight and I immediately wanted to make the film. But I didn’t like the end, the death of Olivia; I didn’t want her to die so I convinced Niccolò.
The subject of young people has always fascinated Bertolucci, who won an honorary Palme d’or last year, and when asked how, 9 years after “The Dreamers” one manages to get into the head of an adolescent, the 71-year-old director of “Last Tango in Paris” responded laughing. “I have a case of arrested development (he used the English words and said he didn’t know how to say that in Italian), but it wasn’t so difficult with such a good book.”
Tea Falco said of the experience of working with Bertolucci in “Io e Te”, “We experienced a moment of great melancholy”, to stress all of the painful loneliness, rebellion, and desperate anxiety of the characters, that in that basement think about escaping the world, their problems and their lives.
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