Review of Youth Without Youth (2007) by Jean-Francois V — 11 Nov 2010

"Youth Without Youth" is like an Indiana Jones movie without.

Action scenes: set in a variety of locales (Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India) if features a bunch of comic book nazis trying to lay hands on a supernatural object (the protagonist himself) in order to advance their plans for world domination (I thought at one point we would get to see Hitler and his secretary, but neither Bruno Ganz nor Alexandra Maria Lara would change costumes.) It can also be described as a high-brow superhero movie, if there were such things as high-brow (or even upper low-brow) movies (I tend to think the highest they ever get is the chin.) As a surrealistic tale, it is also reminiscent of "The Fall", in a less playful and more intellectualistic way.

Thematically speaking, "Youth Without Youth" was right up my alley, dealing with time, foreign languages and extraordinary mental abilities. But I didn't feel it had anything really profound to say about them. Maybe it was the pulp scifi approach that made everything seem a little bit cartoonish. Tim Roth discusses with his elusive "double" like Gollum with Smeagol, a mad German scientist electrocutes dangling horses in a laboratory from a James Whale movie, a sexy Nazi spy puts on lipstick and strips to her garter belt... I don't know if there is much more substance to the original Mircea Eliade novella, but I'm not sure that 140 pages was enough to flesh out what is a best an intriguing skeleton based on a brilliant premise.

Disappointing to me also was the pointlessness of the whole quest for the primal language. Ultimately, it could only lead to what the hero calls something like "the first inarticulate cry", and what wisdom can there be in that? I was also skeptical of a film that seems wholeheartedly to embrace the denial of the law of excluded middle, with its protagonists agreeing at one point that a thing can either be so, not so, both so and not so, and neither so nor not so...