Youth Without Youth (2007)

From https://pics.filmaffinity.com/
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Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola

Based on the Novel by Mircea Eliade

Cast: Tim Roth as Dominic Matei; Alexandra Maria Lara as Laura/ Veronica; Bruno Ganz as Professor Stanciulescu; André Hennicke as Josef Rudolf; Marcel Iureș as Professor Giuseppe Tucci; Adrian Pintea as Pandit

Youth Without Youth is an odd film, I won't deny it. Admittedly adapted from a novel by Mircea Eliade, a lot of this curious premise - in which an old lecturer Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is hit by lightning grows young, can read books by merely looking at time, and becomes a superhuman intelligence - is likely from there, something I will get into later. As much of it though is knowing Francis Ford Coppola made the film without compromise, wrote the film clearly with no compromise and will shot the material like a boss.

He's not made a film since Twixt (2011)¹, part of a trilogy not connected together barring the fact that, returning to cinema briefly, the legendary director of the Godfather trilogy made three films on his own whims having spent over ten years away tending his winery - Tetro (2009) and Twixt, the later an odd experience meant to be a horror film co-edited by viewers but becoming a 3D horror film where Val Kilmer occasionally talks to the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe, were idiosyncratic to say the least, but Youth Without Youth was a sudden return which referenced back to both his virtues and his notoriety of being obsessed with making distinct films.

Starting under Roger Corman and a string of films by the end of the sixties to find his own voice, his career reached its peak in the seventies, not only with the incredible success of the first two Godfather films but The Conversation (1974), before finishing the decade with Apocalypse Now (1979), famously the Vietnam War adaptation of Hearts of Darkness that turned into a warzone on set in its chaos. It's only into the eighties where, while he'd make highly regarded films like One From the Heart (1981) and Rumble Fish (1983), his star started to falter in terms of One from the Heart's disastrous box office success forcing him to have to spend the rest of the eighties recouping its cost. In fact into the early nineties, economic reasons was one of the reasons the divisive third Godfather film was even made, thought at least he also made making Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), which I'll defend barring Keanu Reeves trying an English accent.

From https://www.cinemaclock.com/images/580x326/77/
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By the end of the nineties, whilst The Rainmaker (1997) was more of a John Grisham adaptation than a Coppola film, the Robin Williams family film Jack (1996) was considered a nadir. Returning in 2007, Coppola made both a luscious and frankly bug nuts film, as in Roth plays a man whom as if given a second chance of life, grows young through the thunderbolt of youth, exploring the history of human language, and human intelligence in general, whilst in the midst of Nazi occupied Austria finding himself eyed by Nazis wanting to make superman from his example. Having lost of the love of his life years ago, she'll eventually return as Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), almost reincarnated and also hit by lightning, becoming a conduit for ancient female Buddhists and souls that regress to her physical ailment to the beginning of human communication.

It's a difficult film in them to unpack, its source material clearly belonging to magical realism which intermingled World War II drama, a drama about linguistics, romance and tragedy, all alongside an ending which seems like it's going to cop out and say it's all a dream, which it might've all been still, but plays more like a circular story of a man's life that is from an entirely different era of cinema than the 2000s. It's a film, bluntly, where you need to accept the premise entirely or you'd hate it. The first half, set in WWII Romania does calmly take you through the premise, in which the late Bruno Ganz is a doctor fascinated by him during his treatment for the lightning strike, showing slowly the curious abilities and quirks Roth's characters has acquired. The second half onwards however, when it jumps in time over decades with Veronica possessed by spirits, excursions to Buddhist tombs in other countries and a random cameo by Matt Damon, is a further leap to go with. The notable thing is that the source novella author Mircea Eliade, from Romania, was a historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago who wrote about the concept of the religious experience and was, befittingly, fluent in multiple languages. Naturally for someone who wrote fiction and non-fiction work equally, his source material if Youth Without Youth is accurate is a very idiosyncratic work nourished by the kind of esoteric subject matter Eliade studied in his life. Its however subject matter that is an acquired taste for a larger audience, so you as an audience have to come to this particular adaptation with this in mind.

Coppola, mind, has always shot his films with an incredible scale, which can seesaw in terms of the content between the elegant to the opposite spectrum of the hallucinogenic. Both sides are felt with Youth Without Youth, a lush period film which transitions from WWII Romania to over the next few decades to the seventies, all with the tone of a classic period drama. It's a scale appropriate for a film where the film gets surreal, like Tim Roth having a doppelganger he can talk to in both mirrors and his dreams, Coppola really qualifing as deserving the term "cinematic" with his work. It works with Youth Without Youth, the one virtue to take from it that at least its logic makes sense because the world is built enough to make it acceptable. It effectively takes a film like The English Patient (1996), the same period war drama with English speaking actors in exotic locals, but imagines if Ralph Fiennes had psychic powers. The supernatural content has deeper themes however, which is why it still works - Roth, good in the lead, eventually finding himself asking whether his obsession is worth the sacrifice, finding himself also becoming obsessed in the Atomic Age that nukes are going to destroy the world, all whilst his doppelganger argues it's a necessary for the evolution of super humans to take place.

Does Youth Without Youth work? For myself yes, as a curious hybrid. It is, for obvious reasons, very esoteric and wouldn't have won over casual fans of Francis Ford Coppola's work. It is however clearly made by a man who didn't need to get back into the director's seat and, when he decided to, was because he wanted to make this film and as good as possible. As mentioned, he'd make two more films in this unofficial trilogy, none of them connected in the slightest in terms of style or subject matter, but in terms of a director having a short burst of creativity between 2007-2011 where he was still being experimental, Tetro still (as a drama starring Vincent Gallo) with a bold monochrome look and tone having a boldness alongside Youth Without Youth and Twixt. Whilst Youth Without Youth is not abstract, it's certainly engaging.

Abstract Spectrum: Magical Realism/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://motionstatereview.files.wordpress.com/
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1) Well, there is an ongoing film project named Distant Vision, which I didn't know about until this review, which has had "proof of concept" screenings at two American education institutions between 2015 and 2015.