Sarandon delivers sparks for Bertolucci’s last script – a portrait of love and addiction
Susan Sarandon is on the outer with Hollywood but they love her in Italy and she is one of the stars of this year’s ST. ALi Italian Film Festival.
It was good to see Susan Sarandon in fine form at the Venice Film Festival. She stars in Andrea Pallaoro’s English-language film The Echo Chamber, which closes the St ALi Italian Film Festival, opening nationally in Australia this week.
The still gorgeous 79-year-old explained how she loved making the Italian film while she continues to lose Hollywood roles due to her public advocacy for Palestine.
“I think it’s not just with me, but (also) with other people who have been told that it was impossible in terms of being able to do this film,” she said. “I thank Andrea for that because he didn’t listen to the warnings.”
Based on a screenplay that Bernardo Bertolucci was writing with collaborators Ilaria Bernardini and Luedovica Rampoldi at the time of his death in 2018, the film is a story about love and dependency, set in a large plush London flat. It follows Leonardo, Luca Marinelli’s music producer who is suffering from chronic back pain. While he is being treated by his doctor-girlfriend Anne, played by Alicia Vikander, he is feeling the pressure of recording a new album for semi-retired singing icon Ava May, played by Susan Sarandon (a big Bertolucci fan).
“When I saw The Conformist (Bertolucci’s 1970 masterpiece), I didn’t know cinema could do that,” Sarandon says. “It was so completely different the way it looked, the way he told the story. Later I became a close friend of Bertolucci’s because of my relationship with Louis Malle, and I knew him as a fun guy, and just a completely different person than the one who had done The Conformist.
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“But recently I saw the film again. I brought my son, who is a filmmaker, to see it and it is so modern. Some of the cinematography and the way the scene in the train is shot, for instance, or the camera being where the leaves are being blown … it just holds up so beautifully.
“When we were doing The Echo Chamber in this amazing apartment, it became a world where we spent the whole day. We ate there and we stayed there. There were no trailers (caravans). There was no escape.”
The St ALi Italian Film Festival is the world’s largest festival of Italian cinema, just as the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, held earlier this year in Australia, is the largest festival of French films. Both Australian festivals are run by Palace, as are many other international film festivals including the Russell Hobbs British Film Festival, starting on October 28.
Palace founder Antonio Zeccola, who emigrated from Italy to Australia in 1957 at the age of 14, made his annual visit to this year’s Venice Film Festival, which has just wrapped, and where he naturally watches a lot of Italian films as well as films for other Palace-run festivals and high-profile films that will make it into Palace cinemas around the country.
For this year’s Italian Film Festival, Zeccola singles out the festival’s centrepiece, Sweetheart for praise. The film won for best actress (Aurora Quattrocchi) and best new director (Margherita Scampinato) at the 2026 David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s version of the Oscars. It follows Milan youth Nico (Marco Fiore) who is on the verge of puberty and is sent to stay with his grandmother in Sicily during the school holidays.
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“You can imagine his life in Milan with all the computers, phone and everything, and he goes to this seaside village in Sicily, where there’s no internet and there’s his grandmother who’s very religious and strict and lives in an art deco house,” Zeccola explains. “They don’t really understand each other because she speaks in the most beautiful poetic Sicilian accent. When you listen to her it’s just fantastic.
“So, there’s a huge difference between them and he finds it very hard to adjust. But when he looks out from the balcony onto the square, there are kids playing football and he tries to get involved a little bit. There’s a beautiful girl who is the same age and that’s a young first love and why the film’s called Sweetheart. It’s a really beautiful, subtle film where the subplot is the different cultures – the Sicilian versus the Italian with the bloody phones in their hands all the time.”
The festival will also showcase a retrospective on iconic Italian actress Anna Magnani (who died at the age of 65 in 1973), with three films screening in the program.
“Italians love her,” Zeccola says. “She was not a great beauty but a very serious actress.”
Anna Magnani – The Untold Story is a biopic with Monica Guerritore playing the actress and follows her career and her life. Two of Magnani’s most famous films are part of the program – Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, a searing portrait of post-war Italy’s celebrity obsession, where a mother’s desperate pursuit of film stardom exacts a heartbreaking personal toll; and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Rosa, where she again played a mother, this time fighting for her son’s future.Tthe once-banned neo-realist classic remains an unsparing depiction of post-war Italian survival.
The Australian/Italian co-produced documentary Sand Roads is also part of the programme. It follows three young Australian men on a 50,000km quad bike journey across three continents to break a Guinness World Record while fundraising to combat global poverty. Sixteen years later, intimate road footage, a rediscovered diary and contemporary reflections form a heartfelt film about friendship and tragic loss.
Other festival films include Holy Cannoli, directed by Pierfrancesco “Pif” Diliberto, which is the opening night film. It follows Arturo, a successful real estate agent (played by Pif) who has a passion for desserts and falls for a charming, devoutly Catholic pastry chef, Flora (Giusy Buscemi).
Three Goodbyes, based on the bestselling novel by Michela Murgia and directed by Isabel Coixet, is the festival’s special presentation. Bittersweet and emotionally charged, it stars Alba Rohrwacher and Elio Germano as a couple who split after what seems like a trivial argument, and their lives change dramatically.
Meanwhile, Beloved, starring Miriam Leone, Stefano Accorsi and Tecla Insolia, explores motherhood, love and freedom when following the lives of two women connected by invisible threads.
The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival presented by Palace screens across Australia including Adelaide, September 16 to October 13, at Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas and Palace Nova Prospect Cinemas; Byron Bay, September 17 to October 14 at Palace Byron Bay; Ballina, September 17 to October 14, at Ballina Fair Cinemas; Brisbane, September 24 to October 18, at Palace Barracks, Palace James Street.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema. She is a voting member of the Lumiere Award.
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