Bertolucci’s Last Screenplay Finally Reaches the Screen: Pallaoro’s ‘The Echo Chamber’ Premieres in Venice

Andrea Pallaoro has world-premiered The Echo Chamber in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and the credit that matters most sits on the writing line. The screenplay is the last that Bernardo Bertolucci worked on before his death in 2018 — a text left unmade for years, now handed to another director to finish the sentence its author could not.

That is the film’s charged premise before a single frame: what does it mean to direct a dead master’s final script. Bertolucci developed the story with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi; after his death the producer Nicola Giuliano kept it alive and, in 2024, offered it to Pallaoro, the Italian-born, US-based director of Hannah and Monica, a filmmaker known for patient, close-held portraits rather than for grand gesture. The pairing is the story: a chamber intimist taking on the last words of Italian cinema’s great sensualist.

Fittingly for a title about time and memory, the film is built to blur its own edges. Shot in English and running 120 minutes, it follows a love story between Leo (Luca Marinelli) and Anne (Alicia Vikander) in which the borders between presence and absence, care and dependence, desire and control slowly dissolve. Susan Sarandon plays Ava, a voice that carries across time and returns to the surface what endures. It is a small cast for a large idea, and the casting spans exactly the European art-cinema register the material asks for.

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Behind it is a solidly Italian production — Indigo Film and Rai Cinema, producers Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Carlotta Calori and Viola Prestieri, with Belgium’s Versus Production co-producing — making an English-language film for the world market. That, too, is part of the argument: Bertolucci was always the Italian master most at home crossing borders, and the film carries that instinct.

The risk is equally plain. A posthumous screenplay is an inheritance and a weight; the danger is reverence, a film so careful with its source that it forgets to breathe. Whether Pallaoro’s stillness releases the text or embalms it is the question the Sala Grande puts to it, and it is not one the pedigree answers on its own.

The Echo Chamber competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It opens in Italian cinemas on 10 September through 01 Distribution, with an international rollout to follow.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli, The Echo Chamber, Andrea Pallaoro

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