2013.09.06

FILMS_REVIEWS_ME & YOU by Bernardo Bertolucci

Me & You, a film by the consecrated director Bernardo Bertolucci (2013), is like one of those tiny seeds that leaves an aroma that lingers in the mouth and can be tasted for days. Because what I think that this film manages to do is not solely achieved by cinematic technique, it’s much more than just that, given that at the end, everything dissolves into something fragile, which in turn shows the filth of the world, the radical solitude into which bodies are torn, filthy and trapped within a feeling that is bigger than themselves, illuminating the power of an encounter. The Other, when entering your orbit, can turn everything upside down, possessing a force strong enough to change one’s course; but beware, because the beauty of their encounter lies in its texture, deeply fragile, delicate, with a subtle and instantaneous efficiency and scent – its prolongation can never be guaranteed.

A 14-year-old boy decides to spend his Easter holidays in the basement of the family home without anyone knowing. He brings the necessary provisions for survival: coke, music and an ant farm, he may just feel as though this tiny insect holds the secrets to community life. But happiness is short lived, because it will be suddenly interrupted by the arrival of his sister looking for a place to dry out cold turkey.

The boy does not welcome her. He greets her arrival with apathy. But neither of them have any intention of leaving the bunker, and they will have to share, for a while, this dusty underground box that does not seem to be of this world. And somehow, this will become the thing that breaks down each other’s barriers and the element that, without permission, infiltrates their own worlds. It may appear as though they are two strangers, but they share a father as much as they share this hideout, and a brother is not just another person. So, unwittingly, they will start to soften their loneliness with pain and sleep, and with some more-or-less fragmented, loose, amorphous stories.

He with his teenage presence, as though a simian trapped in too small a cage, who does not yet know almost anything of the outside world but his mother and school, but who, however, is able to bring relieve to the unbearable pain of the absence of smack in his sister’s body. She, with those awkward gestures, that collide with everything, that break things, that clutter the absurd campsite of her brother’s inert adventure.

Gradually, the blaring music and the planet of ants will be replaced by his sister’s detoxification process, there, right in front of him: shaking, moaning, smoking, laughing too, and accounts of her affairs of love and life.

It is not about finding a magic formula in the other, it is not about knowledge, advice or even about alleviating her existence, that although still very brief, already brings with it grief. But somehow, when someone shares with you his or her own loneliness, it becomes yours. So, dance, songs and music work much better than any articulated discourse in the genesis of a meeting.

Perhaps this is because dancing, putting one body traumatized by language close to the body of another and allowing it to be rocked by the songs, makes us vehicles of our own language. Surely Bertolucci’s mastery in handling light, space and shots contributes to bring out the spark of the film, but I think the essential is elsewhere, it is outside his knowledge; I may be wrong, but I think what is at stake has much more to do with his own youth, with the way he lets himself be caught by life, by a passionate way of looking, ready to let himself be surprised.

This is why the characters he presents to us don’t fall into easy clichés, he doesn’t show us a junkie in his twenties and a teenager misunderstood by the world. He shows the subjects that wear these labels, but as though they were just casual clothes that do not tell the whole story of who they are. The same can be said for the others: a grandmother in the last days of her life who, despite the pain that her bones are bearing and her wish to die, is still able to see her grandchild with knowing eyes, or a mother who wished life was easier or the shoes of a drug mule in a window.

There is no guarantee that once they come out of their self-imposed exile they submit themselves to over Easter, she will stop using heroin and he will find the solution to dealing with his family and school life but something has changed in their gestures: the boy’s fleeting smile illuminates and transforms that face full of pimples. The future is still to be written.

Irene Dominguez

https://colochosblog.wordpress.com/category/cine/

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