In the Italian coming of age dramedy Me and You, we meet fourteen-year-old Lorenzo with his pimply face, see through mustache and bad attitude. Lorenzo lives with his mom in a comfortable Rome apartment and yearns for some low-pressure solitude. Telling his mom that he’s off to a weeklong ski holiday with schoolmates, he instead hides out in their apartment’s basement storage unit. He has stocked the basement with his favorite foods, it has a bathroom and he can listen to his tunes on headphones. It’s all looking up for him until his heroin-addicted older half-sister Olivia intrudes, looking for a place to go cold turkey.
Lorenzo resents the intrusion, but Olivia threatens to tell his mom. It turns out that the two don’t really know each other. (Lorenzo’s dad had left Olivia’s mom for his mom – and the two mothers don’t communicate.) The siblings bicker. As any 14-year-old would be, Lorenzo is fascinated by this young woman. Still immature herself, she has already lived a life – and there’s much Lorenzo can learn about the adult world from Olivia. Perhaps they can even bond for the first time as brother and sister…Lorenzo isn’t going to get his solitude, but he may get an unforgettable adventure instead.
There’s a lot of humor in Me and You, primarily stemming from the ski trip ruse and the sibling interactions. Me and You also contains a very realistic and unvarnished depiction of detox and relapse.
This is 72-year-old Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s first film since The Dreamers in 2003 (my choice for the best film of that year). Bertolucci, of course, is the writer-director of Last Tango in Paris (which I don’t think holds up well today) and The Conformist, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky (which still stand up as excellent films). With The Dreamers and Me and You, Bertolucci seems to be matching his finest work.
I saw Me and You at the San Francisco International Film Festival; it is still waiting for a US theatrical release.