“The Echo Chamber”, interview with actors Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander

In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, The Echo Chamber, directed by Andrea Pallaoro, stars Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander as a couple whose intimacy slowly curdles into dependency, confined largely within a single apartment. The screenplay was originally begun by Bernardo Bertolucci, before being reshaped by Pallaoro, along with screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini, and Ludovica Rampoldi into what the two actors describe as a deeply personal film about the marks people leave inside one another.

An echo of Bertolucci

Asked what it meant to work on a script that carries Bertolucci’s fingerprints, Vikander ties the question directly to the film’s title: “This film is actually The Echo Chamber, and I mean the title is kind of referring to this drama between these few characters in a very small space, an apartment. There’s a lot of echoes throughout the film and within the space,  it’s not just music, it’s also objects, it’s memories, it’s dreams, it’s the behavior of these characters that have been trapped”. For her, having a screenwriter of Bertolucci’s stature originate the first version of the script was, in its own way, fitting: “That has obviously lingered over the entire shoot and making of this film, but then it’s also been fully inhabited. First by Andrea, then by us, to make it this personal film”. Marinelli agrees that echo is the movie’s central theme, but credits Pallaoro with carrying that inheritance: “We were so happy to be part of this movie because he’s an amazing artist, and I love his humanity, his human and artistic approach to actors and to stories. He put all his passion and all the respect for this huge echo that he was bringing on his shoulders, the echo of Bernardo Bertolucci”.

The traces we leave in each other

The film’s premise, that relationships leave residues inside the people who live them, struck Marinelli on a personal level: “I really like the idea that the film gave me, and I think it will make the audience think about the traces that we leave in somebody’s life once we connect, even for a brief amount of time. I don’t know if it’s something I never really thought about, and the film made me think about that”. For Vikander, that idea is inseparable from what it means to be a person, and from her own craft: “I think that is what creates a life and a person. We inhabit all the relationships and events, and that’s very much my work as an actor too. I use the tools of my imagination and also history and experiences, but then they morph into something new that hopefully will have an effect on other people”. Marinelli, half-joking about the sweat he was leaving in the room from having to speak English, brings the thought back to the film: “We always have to take care of what we’re leaving on the other person, on others, when we have the chance to think about it”.

When love becomes control

Pallaoro has described The Echo Chamber as a love story inseparable from pain, and the two actors are asked whether a relationship built on that much codependence can ever work. For Vikander, the tension is simply part of being human: “We’re talking about the biggest emotions, and it’s kind of like yin and yang — it’s going to exist all the time, I think”. What defines the couple at the centre of the film, she explains, is how far that balance is pushed: “It’s when love and tenderness can become dependence, and when care suddenly can become control. It’s still the same fluctuations that I think any relationship should have, but maybe there’s a version, a wave of that spectrum, that could make people happier and more content — that’s my own personal view”. Those forces, she adds, never really disappear: “I think those powers will always exist, and that kind of is nature, but with these two characters in this particular film, they’re very much out to the extreme”.

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