Me and You – Adolescence and sensibility

Getting to know you: Jacopo Olmo Antinori and Tea Falco

I like to imagine Bernardo Bertolucci and Roman Polanski have had fist fights over who likes apartments more. While Polanski is probably the master of the apartment-set almost-a-play film, Bertolucci has a similar passion for such intimate surroundings, playing them more for familial or romantic drama than the psychological thrillers of the paranoid Pole.

In his latest film, his first since 2003’s The Dreamers, Bertolucci once again looks at apartment-bound siblings, thankfully steering (narrowly) clear of the incest that helped undermine the prior film.

Me and You follows frustrated, angry 14-year-old Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), who feeling unhappy at school and over-mothered at home, decides to spend some time in isolation to stew in his adolescent ire. When a school skiing trip leaves for a week, he tells his mother he is going on it, but secretly moves himself into his family’s storage room in the basement of his building.

Lorenzo is enjoying his pressure-free time of reading, listening to music and gazing at an ant farm when his estranged half-sister unexpectedly shows up needing somewhere to stay. A sexually charged artsy 20-something, Olivia (Tea Falco) still harbours a grudge against Lorenzo’s mother for “stealing” their father away from her and her mother. She is also coming down from a serious heroin addiction, and decides to use Lorenzo’s closet of solitude as her cold turkey pit stop.

As the two demi-siblings bond over their shared confinement and interests in music, Lorenzo must help Olivia as her condition worsens. He begins to go stir crazy, acting like a caged armadillo he saw in a pet shop, while the ants escape their confinement following an accident. Soon however, both brother and sister learn important life lessons about facing up to your demons. If only a week were all that took…

Drawn out but never quite boring, Me and You is held together by its two strong performances. Antinori in particular deserves credit for both playing and looking like a believable teen. His spot-riddled face and grungy would-be moustache make him look like an everyday reality almost never seen on-screen. His body language – bowed head and hunched soldiers – is utterly convincing.

The film however is not as convincing, and while the slightly flirty relationship between brother and sister never escalates beyond horseplay, the lingering threat that it might makes much of the film more uncomfortable viewing than it might have been in the hands of another filmmaker. It looks great throughout (although the repeated establishing shots of the building to let us know if it’s day or night frustrate), and the soundtrack (The Cure, Arcade Fire, and David Bowie track sung in Italian) make a pleasant accompaniment.

A film about the prisons we find ourselves in, literal or figurative, self-inflicted or otherwise, Me and You is a passable drama that hardly scratches at the greatness of Bertolucci’s best work, such as The Conformist. The ending, with visual echoes of Les Quatre Cents Coups, suggests Bertolucci and co-screenwriter Niccolò Ammaniti felt this was a far more important project than it has proved to be. With Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor rearing its head once more at Cannes this year in a new 3D restoration, Me and You is unlikely to register in the director’s canon. Sadly it’s clear to see why.

2/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Side By Side – Evolution or revolution?

Let’s get digital, digital: Keanu Reeves and Martin Scorsese

The revolution will not be televised, it will be projected. That’s the message of Christopher Kenneally’s documentary Side By Side, which shows in great detail the effect digital filmmaking has had on the industry, beginning life as a budget-friendly side-show, before becoming the medium of choice for almost all the big players in the film business.

Briefly sketching the early history of filmmaking, Side By Side goes on to chart the rapid rise of digital cinematography since the release of the first feature-length movies shot on digital in 1997.

Hosted by actor Keanu Reeves, in conversation with a massive who’s who of contemporary filmmakers, Side By Side certainly covers most of the bases, but never quite qualifies its comparisons.

Amongst the interviewees are digital devotees such as James Cameron, George Lucas and Danny Boyle, while new converts include David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, who until only a few short years ago seemed steadfast in his support for traditional film stock. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, both major digital converts (although Spielberg shot 2011’s War Horse on film), are noteworthy in their absence from the doc.

Only Christopher Nolan is steadfastly opposed to shooting on digital, with even his cinematographer Wally Pfister unwilling to rule it out entirely in future. Elsewhere actor John Malkovich praises how digital allows you to continue shooting, and acting, without breaks for changing the magazine every 10 minutes, allowing continuous performance like in theatre. Actress Greta Gerwig counteracts that by saying how exhausting the non-stop-ness of digital filmmaking is, which David Fincher backs up with an unfortunate anecdote about Robert Downey Jr. on the set of Zodiac.

Aside from film directors and actors, a large number of cinematographers are interviewed, including Pfister (The Dark Knight, Inception), Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now), Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and Anthony Dod Mantle (Festen, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire), offering some fascinating insights. Side By Side also investigates the effect of the digital era on other aspects of the production process, from visual effects to editing and colour grading, providing an outlet for some less-sung heroes of the cinema to have their say. Recent developments such as Higher Frame Rate technology, 3D and 4K+ resolution are briefly touched upon.

Darth Innovator: George Lucas discusses the digital revolution in front of a scene from the best film he never made

While the interviews are Anglophone-centric, with only a brief trip to Denmark to interview the Dogme 95 pioneers of digital filmmaking, Kenneally and Reeves have gone out of their way to track down a far more representative selection of female filmmakers (including cinematography Ellen Kuras and director Lena Dunham) than similar documentaries have done in the past. The documentary should be lauded for these efforts.

The use of footage from representative films is mostly exceptional, although there are some poor choices along the way. When Steven Soderbergh mentions the “revolution” in filmmaking, Side By Side shows us a clip from Che, his digitally shot biopic set in revolutionary Latin America. It’s one of the few times this film patronises.

Where Side By Side fails is in giving film a fair hearing, other than defending it with a “it worked for 100 years, so why change now?” No one discusses the crispness of photochemical film imagery with any of the passion of your average muso down the local record shop defending vinyl over CDs. Keanu can’t quite get anyone to explain to him why film would be preferable to HD. When Soderbergh attacks the dirt that appears on traditionally projected film, no defence of it is offered up. Side By Side works brilliantly as a history of the digital revolution, but in terms of laying film and digital side-by-side, it is found wanting in regards the former.

The film leaves no doubt in the end that the death knell has been rung for film, and digital cinema is most definitely ruling the roost now, but does not manage to answer whether or not this is a good thing. To quote Orson Welles: “It’s pretty, but is it art?”

3/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)