Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review sent in by a loyal NY spy named Hogue who saw the Museum of the Moving Image screening of Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a dog's age: YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. It's not a glowingly positive review, but it does paint he picture of a good film with some flaws. Hope you folks enjoy it!
Hi Harry. I saw that no one has written in, so I thought I would give my impressions of Coppola's new film, Youth Without Youth. The screening was held last night at the Paris Theater here in New York and sponsored by The Museum of the Moving Image. Coppola introduced the movie to a packed house. He spoke (as he has in several interviews) about his need to return to more personal movies after directing so many commercial ones. He was greatly intriguied by the source material, a novel by Miorcea Eliade that details the adventures of an old professor who is hit by lightning and becomes younger and smarter. He asked if anyone had ever drank his wine (he owns vineyards) and most of the crowd raised their hands. He thanked them and called them Executive Producers of the film. The movie immediately establishes itself as nothing like Coppola's done before. The credits run at the beginning of the movie like in the old Hollywood, for example. In the beginning, we see a heavily made-up Tim Roth bemoaning his inability to finish his life's work, a book that deals with the origin of languange. The professor speaks some of the hardest known Oriental languages, like Mandarin and Sanskrit. When his character is suddenly hit by lightning in Romania, he is grotesquely burned and spends part of the movie recovering. The combination of the bandaged man, jumping back and forth in time, and hallucinatory style of the film reminds one of a Gothic English Patient. But soon Tim Roth's meditations on time, love, and language pull the film in its own direction. When the Nazis get wind of the professor and his miracle reverse-aging they go after him, using various methods of persuasion. They are working on a similar experiment but are only working with horses (Godfather, anyone?). Eventually, Tim Roth flees. He witnesses the horrors of war from Switzerland, going from town to town changing identities as his past catches up with him in more ways than one. He continues to work on his book as his facility with language grows. He even invents his own language. Finally, the last part of the movie concerns itself with a love affair between Roth and Alexandra Maria Lara, who's got her own set of language and aging issues. On the whole, the movie is very well-made. It's lush and erotic, made with a distinctly European art pallet. Unfortunately, it's difficult to connect with the movie because it's several movies rolled up into one. At various times, the movie is a supernatural thriller, spy movie, romance, melodrama, and meditation on cognitive perception. There are about a dozen languages spoken and the plot twists (which no doubt work in the novel) are downright laughable in a movie where we're supposed to care about what happens to this cursed old man. The meditations on reality and our perceptions of it (which are the core of a handful of very boring scenes) come across as the ramblings of a drunk European you'd meet in a hostel. And, I'm not alone in my reactions. Based on conversations with other people in the audience afterwards, no one was quite sure what they had just seen. If you like eye candy, I suppose you'll like it. But unfortunately it was hard to muster the enthusiasm that! Coppola has for it. I hope to god, though, that Coppola makes more of these. It's still better than anything he's done in a while and younger directors could still learn a thing or two from him. Incidentally, there was a Q & A with Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, and legendary sound mixer/editor Walter Murch. But someone in our party was feeling ill and we left right after the screening. I'd be curious to hear other people's reactions. Call me Cable Hogue.
