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This story originally ran on July 19, 2014.
Its being republished on the occasion of Bertoluccis death Monday morning from cancer.
New York has always embraced me, Bernardo Bertolucci reflects.
That was the first time I appeared in a wheelchair in public, he says.
As a movie project, it seemed doable.
I thought, I can do this movie with two characters, Berolucci says.
Of course,Bertolucci would make the story his own.
If I dont fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot, he says.
I have to have this emotion, of idealized love.
This is my way of making a story mine.
I cant do that.
I decided Olivia had to walk away on her legs.
The characters in the film are Bertoluccian in other ways, too.
Lorenzo has a bit of an Oedipus complex, but this time, the dilemma is treated with humor.
And very often, I pull from the life of my actors.
Im always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.
InMe and You, that manifested itself in Olivias former career as a photographer.
When we shot the movie, Tea Falco showed me some of her photographs, Bertolucci says.
Shes a real artist.
She did all these ironical self-portraits.
So it came from her own life, this piece of experience.
In the script there is nothing about that.
I often like to quote Jean Renoir, who said, Always leave a door open on the set.
Because reality has to come in through that door.
Could it be the fact that its also his first Italian-language movie in three decades?
I was pleased to hear Italian in my movie again, he says.
But if you dont know Italian, you cant feel and hear a Sicilian accent.
He adds: English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more like something out of Hemingway.
In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary.
you’re able to do more with it.
But theres something else aboutMe and Youthat feels like it may be a renewal for Bertolucci.
But now, something seems to have changed.
Indeed, part of the greatness of his work came from his self-aware treatment of ideology.
As a child of the bourgeoisie, he presented characters struggling with the idea of revolution and class warfare.
In 1964sBefore the Revolution, a young middle class man wrestles with his Marxist political beliefs.
I was living in a country I didnt like at the moment, he now says of that period.
Politically, everything was dissolving, and corrupt.
The psychological connections to his work didnt stop there.
We were far away in the desert, he recalls.
Its the agony of the end of a love story.
She replied, While you were shooting that wall, the Berlin Wall fell!
I remember Malkovich being very excited, thinking about what to wear now that the Wall had fallen.
He placed a lot of importance on style.
Things became different, much less ideological.
In1900, my relationship with politics was very different than when I was in China.
This sense of self-negation, of withdrawal, informs all his subsequent work.
How much of this narrative withdrawal was due to the real-life physical problems confronting the director?
And so, inMe and You, Olivia intrudes on the young Lorenzo.
The film is at once Bertoluccis most confined and most hopeful film to date.
Here, Lorenzo turns away simply because its in his nature.
The director seems to agree.
I was quite shy in real life, when I was young, he says.
So, I used my movies to show myself.
Ive said before that inside every shy person there is a bloody exhibitionist.
InMe and You, however, we see the two siblings on an empty street.
As they embrace, the camera cranes up.
Its like the end of a Hollywood movie, says Bertolucci.
In that frame, we see somebody who has grown up, and is in control.
Lorenzo, however, is clearly smiling.
And that smile, one suspects, partly belongs to the director.
Its the look of a man happy to be back in the world.
