The Echo Chamber

In his light-filled London flat, Leo (Luca Marinelli) has built himself a world in which he produces music and numbs his body’s chronic pain with medication. When the physiotherapist Anne enters his life, the search for relief soon turns into a passionate love story. Yet the intimacy between them also has something destructive about it. Affection here readily turns into dependence. After an overdose, Leo returns from rehab. Anne has disappeared, but her presence seems to have lodged itself in the rooms. Memories overlay reality, voices echo through the flat, among them that of a mysterious singer, Ava. And little by little it becomes uncertain what of this love was actually lived and what exists only in Leo’s imagination.

“The Echo Chamber” goes back to Bernardo Bertolucci’s last, unfinished screenplay. Andrea Pallaoro, who in “Hannah” and “Monica” explored loneliness as a physical condition, turns it into a chamber piece about love as a prison. Time jumps back and forth, people are present in rooms they should long since have left. The flat thus becomes the echo chamber of the title, in which every feeling returns until no one knows any more whether they are in love or only hearing their own longing.