Bernardo Bertolucci‘s last film was The Dreamers (’03), and then he suffered a series of back surgeries that led to his being in a wheelchair…at age 72! And then he announced last year that his return film, Io e Te (Me and You), based on Niccolo Ammaniti‘s young-adult book about a 14-year-old boy “who hides from the world in his family’s basement, along with his even more troubled 25-year-old sister,” would be shot in 3D. Then he changed his mind about 3D, calling the idea “vulgarly commercial.”

The only lesson I can derive from Bertolucci’s wheelchair existence is that the older we get, the more spiritual we become. Everything is about the body and the senses and obvious hungers when you’re an infant, and then you start to gradually discover the inwardness and the centered-ness of things, and by the time you’re 20 or 22 or so (if you’re not a total Mitt Romney-like asshole, that is) you know that the spiritual is where it’s at. So if you’ve lost your legs at age 72, you at least have that to fall back on — you don’t need to walk to commune with the sublime and the infinite.

But it still sucks. Walking miles and miles is one of the greatest things you can do with your time when you’re not writing or fucking or eating great food and watching perfectly mastered films on Bluray that haven’t been aspect-ratio raped by Bob Furmanek and the 1.78 or 1.85 fascists.

Io e Te has its press screening at Cannes on Tuesday, 5.22, and its press conference on Wedneday, 5./23.