The Echo Chamber_Much like in Hannah, anchored by Charlotte Rampling’s superb performance that earned her the Coppa Volpi, where an obscure reference was made to an unspeakable guilt never revealed in the film, so too in The Echo Chamber does the protagonist Anne seem to emerge from an analogous dark zone. She claims to live in a house with neither bed nor sofa, without even a kitchen; she hands Leo, her patient, a small pill with blatant and highly dangerous painkilling effects, which will lead to devastating consequences for him. As with all of Pallaoro’s cinema, the protagonists are not compelling for the plots they embody, but rather for their emotional gradient, which ultimately becomes the film’s defining hallmark. Love, psychological dependence, indifference: in Pallaoro’s work, these elements are not the product of a linear progression, but rather coexist from the very outset as potential shapes of a relationship. It is the third character who instead carries a temporal dimension, bringing a substantial backstory. Ava, a once-celebrated singer whom Leo, a music producer, rescues from the silence of a defunct career to coax her into cutting a new record. She is the one who introduces music into the house, delivered through magnificent songs that we only ever hear as sketches, rehearsals, and fleeting attempts, because the house also doubles as a recording studio for both Ava and Leo.
