By Armond White

Youth Without Youth
Direced by Francis Ford Coppola


Ever since the phenomenal popular and artistic success of his Godfather movies, Francis Ford Coppola has become obsessed with pushing cinematic boundaries. He spouted lots of technological humbug, as in his 1979 speech at the Oscars predicting: “We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the Industrial Revolution look like a small, out-of-town tryout.” And he often made a lot of humbug, as with the overwrought Apocalypse Now, the spectacular One From the Heart and lesser follies, such as Jack and his new Youth Without Youth.

It’s a “Twilight Zone”-meets-Jack movie: half-sci-fi speculation, half-love story. But, in a way, the tale of Dominic Matei, an aged Italian linguistics professor who gets struck by lightning and begins to grow younger, is almost not a movie at all. Coppola stakes his claim on video apparatus as the visionary means of art-construction—an objective that gets bungled-up with Matei’s own Structuralist ambitions. The meaning of language, morality, love, memory, history—and cinema—turn Coppola’s depiction of Matei’s new, unpredictable life into arty bloat.

Beginning in 1938 Romania, on the brink of WWII, Matei’s recovery (played by Tim Roth) under the supervision of an experimenting doctor (Bruno Ganz), leads to his escape from Nazi scientists curious about his youthful anomaly. While in exile, encountering sinister medics and spies, Matei is also pursued by his past. Through the fate—or accident—of meeting two women, including a revenant of Matei’s first love, Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), this time-tripping character study goes from curious to bewildering. It’s a strange conceit (adapted from a novella by Mircea Eliade) that is made even odder
by Coppola’s illustrative video methods; nearly every shot is a loaded digital composite.

As in Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, the gist of the story keeps shifting and is superseded by an “out-of-town tryout” process of narrative that isn’t exactly Last Year at Marienbad abstract; it’s just fussy. Matei converses with his psychic doppelganger; he’s seen in delayed and sped-up mirror reflections. Coppola and editor Walter Murch favor overlapping images that complicate without clarifying. Matei’s dilemma is constantly italicized by this technological obsession.

None of this experimentation—the slippage of images and time made easy by digital editing—can sustain the weight of Coppola’s ambition. Youth lacks an emotional hook. Matei’s intellectual isolation (preoccupied with mortality as well as language) becomes distancing. Veronica’s complaint, “You live in another time. You keep yourself shut away in an alien world where I can’t be,” is made all too real by Coppola’s disastrous casting of Tim Roth, a Mike Leigh alumna, who is credibly eccentric and “brainy” but also an off-putting romantic figure. (Where’s Paul Walker, Terrence Howard or Coppola’s nephew Nicolas Cage when you need them?)

Something is uselessly anti-Hollywood—and damnably self-destructive—in Coppola’s dissociating his material this way. Roth’s pipsqueak protagonist has the effect of deflating the film’s flamboyant aspirations. He affects an Eastern European grimness at odds with Osvaldo Golijov’s lush score and Mihai Malamare Jr.’s tactile videography. Coppola’s own affectation is unaccountably humorless next to such Eastern European directors as Dusan Makavejev, Emir Kusturica or Rajko Grlic. Youth Without Youth—which begins with Matei being thunderstruck on Easter Sunday—should be a comedy of regeneration. The final sequence of Matei reunited with his graying, decrepit peers at Café Select suggests an ultimate joke on the intellectual lusts and physical regrets of old men. It ought to be funny.

Excusing Youth as Coppola’s plea for a rejuvenated career is beside the point. Unless Coppola achieves mature perspective—or regains the human touch of the Godfather films and The Outsiders—he’s doomed himself to out-of-town techno-tryouts and brainy debacles.