Archive for the ‘Youth Without Youth’ Category
Youth Without Plot
SINGAPORE : Sometimes,creative freedom is overrated. And sometimes, so is waiting 10 years for another Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece.
The maestro, who gifted cinema with “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”, now gives us a highly-anticipated foray into old-school European cinema with “Youth Without Youth”, a convoluted piece of magical realism about love and mortality.
Because it was made by a brilliant film-maker, there is the temptation to infuse the film with qualities it doesn’t actually possess - like coherence and the ability to engage the audience. After all, there’s always a chance this picture could one day be considered a misunderstood magnum opus. However, speaking specifically in the “now”, it’s just perplexing and feels far too long.
“Youth Without Youth” is an undeniably beautiful film, with Coppola layering image upon image with carefully-chosen camera angles.
But while the visual superfluities are wondrous all on their own, they do nothing to help clarify the story. Adapted from a novella by Mircea Eliade, it tells the tale of 70-year-old Romanian linguistics professor Dominic Matei (a fully-committed Tim Roth) who, having completed a manuscript representing a lifetime’s work, gets struck by lightning. Instead of killing him, the accident makes him younger, somehow enabling him to develop uncanny superpowers and adopt a dark-sided doppelganger who skulks around offering bad advice.
The professor also gets to relive a romance with what seems to be the reincarnation of his long dead former love who, incidentally, channels an early-century spiritualist who speaks Sanskrit. If you’re still following, Matt Damon makes a cameo appearance in the middle of all this, looking as confused as the rest of us.
Sumptuously picturesque, Coppola’s philosophising on age and history is never dull, but is entirely bewildering and stubbornly impenetrable. It feels like the artist over-indulging his personal vision to the point that the most important rule of film-making is entirely forgotten: Your audience must be able to sit through it, too. -
Channel News Asia