Review of Youth Without Youth (2007) by Damien H — 02 May 2008

After a decade spent making wine and money rather than flicks, Francis Ford Coppola comes back with a film about a guy who suddenly finds himself reenergized. Considering how much I've heard Coppola talk about moving back to lower budget filmmaking, I figured that he was trying to grab something of his youth, and he kinda does.

Youth without Youth plays out like a lot of films you've already seen, but it still manages to throw a monkey wrench into any expectations you may have had for it through sometimes baffling story and thematic turns.

Tim Roth stars as Dominic, an old man who's shipped out of his university life to commit suicide. You see, he's now not as effective as a scholar due to an onset of senility. However, a lightning bolt not only fails to kill him but reconfigures him as a young man (not that much difference in looks, Tim Roth acts old without really much more than a wig and a little makeup.

Anyway, unlike some who say that he's suddenly reborn with amazing intelligence, I think the key to getting the film is to realize that what he gains is not necessarily knowledge but the ability to retain everything.

The indestructibility of memory, in turn, allows him to understand first dozens of languages. In his prior life, Dominic had worked on a life's project that attempted to get at the roots of language.

Now that he has this amazing memory, he can really and truly begin the work. Naturally, with esteem like nothing else, the third reich decides it could use Dominic and starts trying to nab him. At this point, Dominic discovers that his conversant relationship with language and everything else enables him to telepathy and telekinetic powers.

This transition isn't really handled, but I personally question whether or not Dominic's change has as much to do with physical, in the moment change or perhaps an afterlife or an extended pre-death vision.

These notions come in as Dominic's prior love becomes reincarnated as a woman who is seemingly possessed by an ancient spirit. At this point, Coppola's reinstated himself in his direction. Despite some shoddy CG, Coppola's vision for this project is very unique.

I know most of the focus lands on flashy techniques like flipping the camera upside down, but the sense of lighting, mood, and pacing for most all scenes that don't require a budget (a scene in a train yard is pretty awfully lit because of these budget issues).

What really motivates my interest in the film is Coppola's biographical elements that he places. Nearly everyone has been wondering exacting what the hell popped loose in his head during the production of Apocalypse Now that led perhaps the world's most interesting filmmaker into a 20 year spree of faceless flops.

I think Coppola here stresses through Dominic, a character who, after ignoring his loved ones for his life's work that never gets completed anyway, now finds himself in a situation that he can achieve his life's work but only at the sacrifice of the 2nd reincarnation of that past love, that one's work, no matter how perfect or important, can completely dissolve the personal relationships.

Although the film's resolution of this conflict is maybe a bit one-sided, the conflict is something easily understood and remains a guiding light through what's really a head-scratcher at times.

Coppola leaves a lot of things unexplained that maybe should have been to display a certain "I give a damn about making a film that knows why it's doing what it is," but there's plenty to savor and to help you ignore some of the unearned jumps, melodramatic tendencies, or the atypical period piece settings that pop up now and again.

What makes it all somehow work is Coppola's clear enthusiasm for the project, a certain sincerity that gives the filmmaking, even at its most ludicrous moments, some sense of honesty, something that Coppola's career has lacked for quite a few years.

**** out've *****.