It's a fascinating train wreck in many ways, with flashes here and there of the painful disquisition on mortality it might have been. Salvaging much more was beyond me.
Youth Without Youth (2007)
Runtime: 2 hrs 5 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Andre Hennicke, Marcel Iures
Screenwriter: Francis Ford Coppola
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola
Composer: Osvaldo Golijov
DVD Info
Release:
Jan 5, 2009
Blu-ray Features:
- Anamorphic Widescreen - 2.35
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 5.1 - English, French
- Subtitles - English, French - Optional (SDH)
Reviews
Also featuring a small turn from Matt Damon, it’s a piecemeal, muddled affair that, were it not for that big name at the top of the credits, might never have been made at all.
All those years making wine have clearly impacted on Coppola's storytelling abilities. Let's hope he recovers them before his next directorial outing.
It's impossible to say for sure, but the moral of the story could be: don't waste your time.
Youth Without Youth is tinged with Coppola’s abiding, unquenchable affection for cinema. The eccentric narrative may baffle and meander, but there are glimpses of a great director getting the feel again.
Even ace editor Walter Murch struggles to give coherence to the professor’s fractured, episodic journey through darkening wartime exile in Geneva, to the brighter revelations of ’50s India and the sun-kissed Mediterranean.
Coppola drags everyone on a humourless trudge through a jungle of pretension that will have most moviegoers glazing over long before an ending that really isn't worth the wait.
Far too bookish and strange to fully engage us. But it looks terrific.
You want a story? Look at the front page of your local paper. I'm here for the picture show.
With all the nurses making moves on the suicidal old codger's renovated physique, Coppola's Youth Without Youth comes across as somewhere between The Godfather On Viagra and Apocalypse Then, Redux.
Though not an easy film to grasp or possibly enjoy, it's nevertheless a mindblowing acid-like excursion into the secret world of Orientalism.
This pretentious, impenetrable and deadly dull film never resonates as anything more than an aging filmmaker's feeble grasp at his own lost youth.
Coppola was more efficiently mystical when he wasn't trying so hard.
This is the perfect example of what can happen when a producer/director/writer doesn't have to answer to anyone. Coppola makes an artistic mess.
So much of Youth Without Youth is impenetrable, and not in a way that makes you want to solve the puzzle, but in a way that makes you want to knock the puzzle pieces off the table and flee the room.
It would be easier to sit back and rest on his legend rather than press on as an average filmmaker, which is what Coppola has become.
A classic example of the “what-was-he-thinking?” movie, Youth Without Youth unfolds in a sort of formal dream state devoid of day-to-day normalcy.
Youth Without Youth is so beautiful, in fact, that it almost transcends the epic bunkum of Coppola's script. But almost doesn't count, even when it is uttered in ancient tongues.
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