Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Youth Without Youth / USA/Italy/France/Romania / 2007

“Good luck,” the young man at the box office offered ominously as I headed in for a screening of Youth Without Youth, the first film in a decade from Francis Ford Coppola. I assured him that I had heard the buzz and knew what I was in for. Something difficult and bizarre, the kind of film that critics sometimes designate as being for moviegoers who are “adventurous” when the word they’re really looking for is probably “patient.” And patience is definitely something that this picture demands of its viewers, who are much more likely to be confused or disappointed than moved. The film is simultaneously too muddled not to dislike and too insanely weird not to love just a little.

Based on a novella by Mircea Eliade that I admit I haven’t read, Youth Without Youth opens in 1938 Romania with Dominic Matei, a seventy-year-old professor and would-be author played by Tim Roth. Dominic is struck by lightning and horribly burned, but he wows the doctors not only by surviving the incident, but by somehow healing into a significantly younger man. He hair is fuller and darker, his skin smoother and ruddier; he spits out a mouthful of rotted, wobbly teeth as another set grows in.

There’s more. Already a physical marvel, Dominic is a psychic one as well. It seems he can read books, and even minds, by a kind of osmosis. In other words, he gains superpowers. (Yes, I snickered when he referred to himself as a “mutant”and a “superman.” Blame comic books and my own immaturity. Or Bryan Singer.)

Before you can say “international intrigue,” Dominic becomes a highly-sought secret weapon as the war escalates in Europe and beyond. Interesting questions are raised by Dominic’s fling with a seductive Nazi spy (despite his apparent disgust with the party), and his later decision to live a life of neutrality in Geneva. I was expecting the professor to wrestle with these issues (Maybe concluding that with great power comes great responsibility?), but instead the story leaps ahead with a barrage of newspaper headlines bringing the war to a close and casting all those juicy questions aside. A young woman who appears to be the reincarnation of Dominic’s long-lost, long-dead love appears, and the film throws itself in a number of new directions, all of them strange and none of them really adding up. I thought of The Fountain, briefly, but Youth Without Youth makes The Fountain look like Kate and Leopold.

It’s true that Coppola mounts some terribly gorgeous images in the film, but his visual style here tends to be experimental in the most obvious sense. Frames appear upside-down and sideways, echoing David Lynch at his loopiest, or maybe just recalling the visual tics of some of the lesser-known directors behind the later episodes of Twin Peaks. It’s as if the veteran director is playing with the shape of the movie screen, turning things around and seeing what comes out. You may find this endearing or infuriating, depending on your level of – er, adventurousness – but chances are you won’t find it nearly as interesting as Coppola does.

For his part, Roth is about as credible – and even curiously appealing – as anyone could have managed to be as Dominic. (That Roth seems to have enacted even Coppola’s oddest requests – like delivering his lines while lying naked, facedown, in a bathtub – suggests that he has developed that same perilous but admirable fearlessness as an actor that Harvey Keitel has. Pity his trust in Coppola begins to feel misplaced.) If anyone could keep this crazy train from going off the rails, it would be Roth. But he doesn’t, and it does, though a few wild-hearted moviegoers will find themselves enjoying the ride anyway.

by Victoria Large | Source: 35MM Print
08 Jan 2008 11:07 PM | Submit Comment