Me and You (Io e te)

“Me and You” by Niccolò Ammaniti (2010) is an Italian coming-of-age novel that has been adapted to a movie with the same title in 2012 by the director Bernardo Bertolucci.

Book:

The story takes place in Rome, Italy in 2000. The main character of the story is a 14-year-old boy called Lorenzo. He is highly introverted and is diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, which means that he considers himself superior to all the others, apart from his parents. His parents have sent him to a public school so as him to get to know how real life is. However, Lorenzo faces adaptation problems and tries to become as ordinary as he can so as not to be distinguished and teased by his classmates. Lorenzo is very attached to his mother, who cares a lot about his social problems. The whole story begins with Lorenzo telling his mother that he has been invited to spend a week holiday with some of his classmates, although they actually hadn’t invited him. Lorenzo, instead of going with them, managed to go to his house’s basement and planned to spend the week secretly on his own. Nonetheless, an unexpected visitor shows up, his half sister, Olivia. The two siblings make a deal: Olivia will stay with him in the cellar, as she has nowhere to go, and she will pretend to be one the classmates’ parents so as Lorenzo’s mother not to understand that he is lying. Their coexistence is very difficult as Lorenzo initially is not eager to help her and especially as he discovers that his half sister is suffering from withdrawal from heroin. She is experiencing a desperate situation and has emotional and physical pain. Lorenzo goes to the hospital and takes some sleeping drugs from his seriously ill grandmother and when he returns, finds Olivia almost dead. Fortunately, she uses the sleeping drugs and manages, after days of sleeping, to feel a little bit better. The last night they spend together, they have a meal, talk about themselves and exchange promises. Olivia promises not to start drugs again and Lorenzo to meet her again soon. The book stops after ten years, when Lorenzo goes to Cividale del Friuli (a small town in Northern Italy) to see his dead sister due to drug overdose. None of them had kept their promises.

Film:

The main difference as far as the story is concerned between the movie and the book is that in the film the tragic ending is not mentioned and the story ends at the ending of this “secret” week. Moreover, some intriguing and alternative changes or additions in comparison to the actual manuscript can be distinguished easily in the film. One of them is the relationship of Lorenzo with his parents and the way in which Olivia faces the second wife of her father. To be more specific, their father seems superficial and absent from his children’s lives. As far as Lorenzo’s mother is concerned, she is much more caring in comparison to her husband but more showing off, as she goes regularly to expensive restaurants. Also, Lorenzo, in order to shock his mother, asks her once if the two of them could have children in case they were the only living people on the planet. Olivia has the same anger feelings towards her mother in the film and the book, but her attitude towards her father and Lorenzo’s mother is much more calm but somehow disrespectful in the film. Furthermore, in the movie Olivia has a boyfriend who is the reason why she is trying to quit drugs.

Book Vs Film:

The way in which Niccolò Ammaniti describes the events is superb. Through flashbacks, simple way of writing and a few pages (117 pages), he manages to depict Lorenzo’s life, his perspective of the world, his complicated thoughts and feelings and his relationship with his family. Another fascinating fact in Ammaniti’s story is that he handles a hard and complicated situation, but depicts it as something quite simple and humane.

On the other hand, the movie has some very interesting points. Only the fact that it has been directed by such a well-known and successful director like Bertolucci is very important. Also, this movie was his last one, as he passed away recently (2018) and he directed it while being on a wheelchair. Another challenge that the big screen adaptation faced was that the vast majority of the shots were made in the basement. So, there was the fear of the movie being quite repetitive and boring and thus the photography director used many different angles and lightings so as to avoid that monotony. In addition, Bertolucci’s glory can be shown by the fact that he was 70 years old while filming a movie referring to a teenage boy. To sum up, at least as far as the background of the filmmaking part is concerned, the movie is of great interest.

The protagonists of the movie and the film director at the Cannes Film Festival.

The story handles many topics, and probably the most hard of them all is the attempt of Olivia to stop drug abuse. Depicted in the film, these events of detoxification may seem repulsive, but they show part of the realistic face of this difficult situation. Moreover, the attraction of Lorenzo to Olivia is reported in a circuitous way in both means, but in the film it is more obvious, although it is never stated directly.

Taking everything into consideration, I strongly recommend both artistic forms as they comprise magnificent works of art and are not in the least bit boring. Each one of them has different advantages and perspectives of the topic.