Francis Ford Coppola makes the Screener cry.
The Screener was so very excited to watch
Youth Without Youth
. It is, after all, the first film after a 10-year hiatus by Francis Ford Coppola-the man who made the
Godfather
trilogy and
Apocalypse Now
. The glee felt when sitting***image2*** down to watch
Youth Without Youth
transported the Screener back to when he was but a wee little version of himself, wearing a mini Mad Hatter hat, fashioning long, polemical essays on the finer points of
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
by the dim glow of his
Power Rangers
night light.
Youth Without Youth
reminds the Screener of Christmas morning when he was 10. Upon waking from his light, impatient sleep, Little Screener sprinted to the tree and went straight for the large, Sega Genesis-sized box. Unwrapping it, he discovered a bag of gym socks and an Encyclopedia Britannica. This is the last time the Screener can remember being so utterly, shoulder-slumpingly, seat-slidingly disappointed. Until now.
Youth Without Youth
, based on a novella by the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, is a fascinating and ambitious-sounding film. It stars Tim Roth as Dominic, a 70-something professor of linguistics in 1930s Romania who, after being struck by lightning, regenerates into a man of 40 or so, unfurling a new set of teeth like a shark and a reinvigorated libido like a post-Viagra Hugh Hefner.
Additional gifts include the ability to absorb a book's knowledge by simply passing his hand over it and the power to always win at roulette. Moreover, the shock has given Dominic a split personality and/or doppelganger.
The two Dominics bicker about esoteric philosophy of language and engage in a fight that results in a broken mirror; Dominics multiply a thousand-fold, each screaming, "What have you done?" (Henry Kissinger once said something to the effect that academic debates are particularly fierce because the stakes are so low. This, apparently, is especially true of academic debates between symbolic split-personalities.)
Nazi eugenicists, who wish to study Dominic in order to make über-know-it-alls, are on his tail. First, the Nazis send a sexy spy whose swastika-embroidered garter-belt gives her away. Next, mastermind ***image1***eugenicist Dr. Rudolph (André Hennicke) is dispatched. In a particularly ludicrous cut-away we see his Nazi lair-a lair one step more cartoonish than the Bat Lair-as he experiments with lightning. Dominic evades capture (in one of cinema's most impressively "what the fuck?" inducing
deus ex machinas
) when he suddenly realizes he possesses the telekinetic ability to make people shoot themselves in the head.
The next half of the film is dedicated to Dominic's love for a woman named Veronica, who was struck by lightning too. But the result is different this time. Veronica begins to experience past-life regressions as channeled through a seventh century Indian yogi named Rupini. Each night Veronica/Rupini goes back further in time, speaking ever more ancient languages. Will she eventually reach the proto-world language, conveniently allowing Dominic to complete his life's work?
Though dark and moody in tone,
Youth Without Youth
is less noir than it is pinot noir. That is, though the film was financed by Coppola's successful California vineyard, it also seems to have been created under the influence of its product. More accurately, it's a mash-up of
The Da Vinci Code
,
Powder and The Fountain
by way of crack cocaine.
Like a fine, aged wine struck by lightning and made young again, Coppola really seems to be getting younger-but not in a good way. He's gone from masterpieces to average Hollywood crap to 10 years of director's block to unrestrained amateur. Though he's retained a nice sense of visual composition, Coppola has reverted to a said-not-shown style that is ludicrous, pretentious and sloppy. Pleasure could be taken by laughing at it if it weren't so damn sad.
