Day 118: Youth Without Youth

"Perhaps you'll take us back to a time before history."

I can't say you'll like Youth Without Youth because frankly, I'm not really sure I liked it. Sometimes the acting gets a little awry, sometimes the camera angles get too pretentious, and other times I wonder what the fuck is going on. Yet, at the same time, I had a rather emotional connection with the film and I loved its bizarre invitation to the outrageous. The score had something to do with this but I also think that some of the dream sequences do make up to something worth seeing. American critics didn't like it very much. It has a measly 30% rating on RottenTomatoes and some reviews are pretty scathing. I don't really think it's that bad but I guess I can't completely say it's quite good.

So the story is this: a man at the age of seventy gets struck by lightning but instead of dying, he not only recovers but he begins to grow younger. He begins to look like Tim Roth. So immediately, whatever is plausible goes out the window. Next we discover, is that Roth's character is a linguist. He's been forever working on a large and ambitious project about the history of all language. To accomplish this, he has to go back to a place that nobody's gone before. To the very beginning of language, or the "proto-language."

If there's one particular thing that the film does very well, it's conveying his appreciation of language and making us appreciate language as well. Some stories make you want to be interested in the character's interests. For example, after listening to the dialog of Sideways, I wished I was also an Epicurean. The way they were able to talk about wine as if they were individuals was remarkable. Here, the mystification of language is upheld and that's a great achievement.

So let's allow the plot to proceed. It's 1930s Romania, so of course it has to be a WWII story. Roth's character is now a fine specimen that people want to study and who likes studying specimens best? The Nazis of course. If they can study his rejuvenation process, they can build a superhuman. They can build the "posthistoric man." At least that's what his little alter ego calls it. Alter ego, you say? Where the fuck did that come from? Oh yeah, apparently when you get struck by lightning at the age of seventy, you develop this alternate persona that makes you have this dual personality that no one else could see. It's sort of like Mr. Hyde. This was a distraction.

But what the plot does add is this little evocation of the thriller genre as he escapes to Switzerland, forges documents, and begins to discover that he has other superhuman abilities. This would have been so exciting! However, the story gets sidetracked into some weird tale where he meets this girl who's demon possessed by a spirit that keeps shouting in all these languages that begin to go backwards to the beginning of time. She starts to slip in and out between the spirit and her true self, but as the spirit starts to take its toll on her, Dominic (Roth's character) comes to the conclusion that he's causing her to be this way. Apparently his interest in linguistics fuels the demon inside her so he decides to leave, and thus never accomplishing his mission to find the language.

So this is where the film begins to falter. The first half however, with him and the superhuman abilities, the Nazis, and etc. Those are pretty interesting and remarkable in themselves. Some of the later stuff makes for terrible cinema (though very well made bad cinema) yet they are romantic and ultimately cultivating in their own way. The themes of consciousness, spirits, youth, time, and language are thought provoking enough to make me say, "perhaps if you have nothing else to watch one day, take a look at this."

Set in 1930s Romania, the sets on screen are quite remarkable yet the cinematography doesn't do its best to complement this beauty. The reason I even began to show interest in this story comes from a video I saw of Coppola shooting digitally and editing with Apple Final Cut Studio. He used these techniques to make this movie and I've been interested in digital production so I decided to give this a look. (I'm also probably going to give Tetro a look as well, but so far, the best film I've seen that was highlighted in an Apple tutorial is Conversations with Other Women but I can't say that that was shot on film or not.)

Coppola purposefully refuses to pan the camera throughout the story and opts for keeping it static. He pans it about seven or eight times because as he says, "the theory is that if you pan it a few times, those few times will be that more dramatic and powerful." I understand the logic of the theory, but it doesn't translate well into practice. I've never been fully comfortable with the digital look yet Che impressed me because I couldn't tell it was a digital camera they filmed with. But this does look like digital film and actually does hamper the look of the film, though there are some very striking images here and the palette is quite wonderful to gaze at.

This is a VERY lukewarm suggestion. Some of the scenes made me feel like I was watching Coppola's version of Watchmen and those scenes are quite fantastic. But as Coppola gets older, he's trying to make a new crop of films that express the things he's now thinking about in his twilight years, but he's still struggling to find out how. I think he's on to something with the direction he's going but his detours along the way make this such an odd endeavor, that the journey is ultimately unworthy, though I don't think completely wasted due to some of the themes, and a lot of the better first half.

Note: What's sad is that in The Godfather there was also some weird subplot yet Coppola decided to break the novel's form and turn the story into a tale similar to one of a king and the arrival of new princes. That led him to make one of the two greatest films ever made. Here he seems to relish into this weird subplot which destroys the movie.