Cast

I wanted to like Francis Ford Coppola’s new art film, Youth without Youth. He made some of the best films ever in the ‘70s (including The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), but most of his subsequent films were either out right failures or partial successes.  

Now Coppola has gone back to his low budget/Indie roots, and I was hoping that he would find something he lost along the way. In Youth Without Youth, he has made a film that is perplexing, and intellectually ambitious, but it ultimately falls apart − a victim of its own ambition. 

The muddled philosophizing in Youth without Youth makes it more reminiscent of The Fountain than any of Coppola’s classic films. 

The film is based in a philosophic novel by the Romanian author, Mircea Eliade. It may be a prime example of an unfilmable novel, and Coppola’s adaptation is endlessly ponderous and talky. Only some of the conversation is engaging. 

The tale takes place over the span of the last half-century in several different countries.  

Tim Roth is Dominic, a 70 year old man in 1938 Romania who tries to commit suicide.  When he is hit by lightning, the high voltage somehow rejuvenates him, and he emerges from the hospital as a thirty-something man (one of the nurses even hits on him).  

Nazis find out about his situation, and they use any means to obtain him for experimentation. The mysterious and alluring femme fatale dubbed the woman in room 6 (a young Marlene Dietrich would’ve been great for the role) sets out to seduce him, and it’s not hard to guess what side she’s on because she wears a garter belt with a swastika symbol on it. 

Dominic flees to Switzerland to escape the Nazis, but he does not completely elude conflict. An evil doppelganger image begins to torment him (the situation is a bit reminiscent of The Fight Club). 

He eventually meets the lovely and luminous Laura, who also survived being struck by lightning. They fall for each other but she begins to talk in old languages and she shows signs that her body is being possessed by old spirits. 

This love story doesn’t end in a satisfactory manner. Despite Roth’s electrifying performance, the film completely loses its way in the last third. But it’s good that Coppola is not repeating himself, and the film is at least a noble failure (It would’ve been much safer to do a “Godfather IV”).