Arab News | Susan Sarandon on fear, freedom, and refusing to change
When Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber premiered at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Sunday evening, it earned an eight-minute standing ovation. For its stars— Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander, and Susan Sarandon— it was a warm reception to one of the festival’s most anticipated world premieres.
Based on Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay and reworked with his original co-writers, Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, the film is both intimate and unsettling, telling a story in which physical pain, emotional dependence, desire, and love gradually become impossible to separate.
At its center is Leo, played by Marinelli, a troubled music producer whose life has been pushed to the edge by addiction and chronic pain. He meets Anne, a physiotherapist played by Vikander, who comes into his life initially to treat his body but ends up reaching something much deeper. Both carry the scars of painful pasts.
Their relationship is vivid, sensual, and sometimes overwhelming: two damaged souls who must learn not simply to love one another, but to let love pass through them and inhabit them without turning it into dependence, possession, or control. Anne becomes Leo’s lifeline. But the rescue is mutual. In trying to save him, she is also brought back to life herself.
Running through their story is another presence: Ava, the aging singer played by Sarandon. Once celebrated for her voice, Ava now confronts the changes age has brought as she works on what may become her final album. Leo becomes her producer. He is emerging from an overdose; she is emerging from the loss of a long relationship and grappling with the uncomfortable question of who she is when the person who shared so much of her life is gone.
The three characters are therefore connected by different forms of damage — and by the possibility that another person can become both a mirror and a way back to oneself.
The danger of being comfortable
For Sarandon, who admits she rarely arrives on a film set feeling safe, that emotional instability made the role frightening. But fear is part of the process, she says. “I would always rather surrender to a director that has a vision than somebody who is already got it marketed and, you know, the studios figured it out.”
Pallaoro had approached her about the role after taking on the daunting task of adapting Bertolucci’s screenplay. Sarandon initially had questions about the character and even imagined a somewhat different musical direction, suggesting artists such as Joni Mitchell. But the director persisted. He traveled to London to meet her and eventually won her trust.
She had trepidation about singing, even though she had once heard Marianne Faithfull perform a duet with David Bowie that, she believed, sounded awful — so why not? “I am always frightened,” she admits. “It takes me weeks to settle down.
And if I am on stage, it takes many performances before I feel like I know what I am doing. I think the fear is part of the responsibility. I don’t have a plan, but I know what I don’t want. To be comfortable for me is always dangerous.”
It is an unexpectedly revealing sentiment from an actress whose career has often been associated with confidence, sensuality, and political fearlessness. But what Sarandon describes is something very different from fearlessness: a willingness to remain exposed. She speaks of waiting for the other actors, staying open to the unexpected, and letting a scene change her. That surrender— to uncertainty, to other people, and to forces beyond her control — runs through The Echo Chamber, a film about what happens when people stop controlling every part of themselves.
Two broken souls learning how to love
Leo and Anne’s relationship is at the heart of the film. He is a man whose body and mind are both in crisis; she is a woman whose own emotional history has left her vulnerable. Their attraction is immediate and intense, but so is the danger it contains.
The film repeatedly asks where care ends, and dependence begins. Pallaoro himself describes the story — the first he has ever directed that was written by someone else — as one in which physical and emotional pain distort the search for intimacy, while tenderness can gradually become control and possession.
Their love becomes a kind of mutual resurrection. Neither arrives whole. Neither can simply ‘fix’ the other. Instead, they have to learn to let themselves be changed by the encounter. This is one reason Sarandon sees her own character’s relationship with Leo as so important. Ava, too, is at a threshold. She has lost the person who defined much of her adult life and is suddenly forced to confront an unfamiliar version of herself.
Sarandon understands that loss as something more complicated than simply losing another person. “When you form any kind of a partnership, that becomes an identity too,” she says. “The partnership identity. And I remember going off on location and being kind of scared. Because I’d be in some terrible motel or hotel in the middle of Texas somewhere. But I was like, okay, I remember, this is who I am. Opening your bag by yourself and you’re scared. But at the same time, it’s good to kind of review that. Before someone dies, it’s good to remember who you are.”
Ava’s aging voice
Ava is a singer, and her voice is no longer what it once was. That becomes part of the character’s vulnerability. She records a new album with Leo, whose own artistic ambitions and personal demons collide. The songs become more than music: they are fragments of Ava’s former self, echoes of a woman she once was.
The Echo Chamber offers no clean transformation. The past does not disappear simply because the future arrives. Instead, Ava has to find a way to carry the woman she used to be into the person she is becoming. Sarandon compares it to a butterfly: transformation is not an erasure of what came before, but a continuation of it. That idea is particularly poignant because the character’s voice— her most obvious instrument of power — is precisely what has changed with age.
Asked about the power of using one’s voice — and why people so often fail to use it — Sarandon does not immediately talk about speaking. She talks about listening.
“People speak out; they do. But do you know what people don’t do? They don’t listen. When my boys were starting to date, I would say, look, learn to cook two meals, and learn to listen. You don’t have to be entertaining, trust me. Just really listen, and you’re going to be fine with everybody. Because I think listening is a lost art. On screen, my superpower… I am a good listener,” she adds with a laugh. “Being present and really listening.”
That quality is perhaps one of the keys to understanding her performance. Sarandon does not approach acting as a demonstration of emotion. She describes it instead as an act of openness— allowing another actor, a piece of music, or an unexpected moment to reach her. “I’m against that theory that you have to be really messed up to be talented,” she says. “I think it’s harder to be both a human being and an artist, but it is possible.”
Social activism and Palestine
That philosophy extends well beyond the set. Sarandon has spent years speaking publicly about AIDS activism, Haiti, social justice, and, more recently, Palestine. Her outspoken support for Palestinians has had professional consequences: she continues to lose film roles, and agencies have discouraged producers from hiring her. The United Talent Agency dropped her in 2023 because of her political statements and pro-Palestinian activism.
Yet when asked about courage, Sarandon rejects the word. “I don’t feel like I have courage at all,” she says. Instead, she describes what she calls an “overdeveloped need for justice,” tracing it back to her childhood. She remembers being disturbed by unfairness even as a child, swapping her dolls’ dresses to make sure they would all take turns wearing the best outfit, and later becoming involved with ACT UP when the mainstream media was failing to adequately cover the AIDS crisis.
“I just see myself as a little flashlight to put on information that maybe…” She pauses before returning to the same principle that seems to guide her acting: she does not claim to know what effect she will have. “It’s not that it’s necessarily successful or that I think I can make a huge difference or change them, but … I don’t want to change myself.”
There is also a lighter side to Sarandon’s relationship with her public image. For audiences across the Arab world, where her outspoken positions have made her a beloved figure, the word ‘queen’ has become part of the vocabulary surrounding her. During our conversation, I tell her that someone in the newsroom had essentially instructed me: ‘You have to speak to Susan. She’s our queen’.
Sarandon bursts out laughing. “Wait, does that include real estate?” Beneath the joke lies something touching: the affection she has accumulated far beyond the borders of Hollywood.
Her political positions have cost her professionally in the US, but they have also reinforced her connection with international audiences who see her as an artist unwilling to separate her work from her conscience. In Venice, she spoke openly about the price she has paid for her positions on Palestine, while also making clear that she feels welcomed by filmmakers and audiences outside the US.
The Bertolucci echo
There is, inevitably, another voice inside The Echo Chamber: that of Bertolucci. Pallaoro inherited the screenplay rather than writing it himself, taking on the challenge of making his own film from the final work of one of cinema’s great auteurs. The director has spoken about the freedom that distance gave him— allowing him to approach themes that were already close to his own cinema while making the material his own.
For Sarandon, Bertolucci’s presence was also personal. She knew him and remembers the profound effect his films had on her, particularly The Conformist. The visual world of The Echo Chamber carries traces of that legacy without attempting simply to reproduce it.
The apartment becomes both refuge and prison. Rooms, mirrors, corridors, and reflections constantly alter the distance between the characters. Music exists inside the world of the film rather than simply sitting on top of it. Pallaoro has described the apartment as a space where care and control become increasingly difficult to distinguish.
And that is where the title becomes particularly resonant. An echo is not an original voice. It returns, changed by the space through which it has traveled.
“That’s what keeps you hooked“
For Sarandon, acting seems to work in much the same way. She never studied acting formally and does not describe herself as someone who retreats into a method and stays there. She can reach an emotional state, she says, but she also wants to be surprised — by another actor, by music, by something that happens in the moment. When she goes home to her children, she leaves the character behind.
Sarandon’s outspoken positions on Palestine have made her a beloved figure in the Arab world where she is often referred to as the ‘queen’
The vulnerability comes not from living permanently inside the role, but from being willing to open the door again every time she returns to set. “That’s what keeps you hooked, I think.”
In The Echo Chamber, almost everyone is looking for a way out: from addiction, grief, an old identity, loneliness, the fear of aging, and intimacy itself. But perhaps the film proposes something more complicated than escape. Maybe we do not evolve by leaving our broken selves behind, but by allowing another person, another voice, another love to reach the places we had stopped allowing anyone to enter.
And for Sarandon, the answer seems simpler still: listen, remain open, accept the fear, and refuse to become someone else simply because the world would find it more convenient. “I don’t want to change myself,” she says.
At 79, in a film about voices, echoes, and reinvention, it is a fitting place to leave her.
