Based on a youth novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, Me and You has warmth and a tell-tale Bertolucci touch, but it's not among his greatest films
There's intimacy and immediacy in this movie from the 73-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci: it's an engaging, if slight, two-hander about a troubled teenage boy, Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) who tells his mother he's going on a school skiing trip but instead hides out in the unused, crummy basement flat under the family home – and finds he has to share it with his older half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco), who is also using it as somewhere to come off heroin. A difficult relationship blooms.
Me and You was based on a young-adult novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, published in 2010, but it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years, especially when Lorenzo and Olivia start singing along to David Bowie's rewritten Italian version of Space Oddity. Something in its slightly earnest imagining of abuse, drugs and young people marks this out as an old man's film. For all that, it has warmth and a kind of neo-New-Wave jauntiness – Bertolucci even fires off a visual allusion to Truffaut in the final moments – and it's similar in many ways to his earlier films The Dreamers and Last Tango in Paris, but less highly charged, and with less at stake. A minor, but valuable Bertolucci film.
Rating: 3/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
There's intimacy and immediacy in this movie from the 73-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci: it's an engaging, if slight, two-hander about a troubled teenage boy, Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) who tells his mother he's going on a school skiing trip but instead hides out in the unused, crummy basement flat under the family home – and finds he has to share it with his older half-sister, Olivia (Tea Falco), who is also using it as somewhere to come off heroin. A difficult relationship blooms.
Me and You was based on a young-adult novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, published in 2010, but it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years, especially when Lorenzo and Olivia start singing along to David Bowie's rewritten Italian version of Space Oddity. Something in its slightly earnest imagining of abuse, drugs and young people marks this out as an old man's film. For all that, it has warmth and a kind of neo-New-Wave jauntiness – Bertolucci even fires off a visual allusion to Truffaut in the final moments – and it's similar in many ways to his earlier films The Dreamers and Last Tango in Paris, but less highly charged, and with less at stake. A minor, but valuable Bertolucci film.
Rating: 3/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.