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.
