(Photo: Still from 'Youth')
Despite the nostalgic disposition associated with the title, Paolo Sorrentino's latest film "Youth" is not so much a treatment of old men yearning for their lost youth, as the casting of the aged Michael Caine (who delivers one of his strongest performance to-date) and Harvey Keitel would suggest. It is rather a poetic melodrama, not void of the cynical element, pondering on the brevity and absurdity of life.
Replete with vivid and powerful images and cinematography that will haunt you long after the cinema experience, "Youth", his second English language film, resembles a kaleidoscopic puzzle, elaborately knitted together piece by piece by Sorrentino. (His Italian film "The Great Beauty" won 2013 the Oscar for best foreign film.)
Set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, reminescent of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, it is also a time-transcending mystical place that will not leave its wealthy visitors unchanged, with Sorrentino perhaps wishing it will have the same effect on viewers.
We follow Fred Ballinger (Caine), a retired British composer-conductor and Mick Boyle (Keitel), American film director and script-writer. With their children married to each other, they are life-long friends, grumpy sarcastic friends, having resonances with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon who whine daily about their prostate, urinating, and that they do not remember their old lives.
Despite undergoing a complete body-check up, including massages, steam baths and physical exercises, Balinger considers them a waste of time, as he is undoubtedly expecting death. Whereas Boyle retreats with his film crew (one could think them voices in his head as they speak and move in a synchronized fashion) in order to finish the script he is working on, his testament to the world, as he describes, Ballinger who describes himself as apathetic, spends his days idly, wondering around, rejecting even a persistent appeal by Queen Elizabeth II to conduct one of his masterpieces. While in the night he is poorly entertained by mediocre performances of erratic music bands and fire-eaters.
Despite having created many compositions, Balinger is brand marked for his masterpiece "Simple Songs,"a treat he shares with bizarre film star Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) who retreats to the sanatorium to prepare for his next role and cynically complains that he is being remembered by his fans only for a minor robot-role he deems as unworthy, an allusion to the burdens of a past that we fail to shake off.
Shot in the picturesque landscape of the Alps, the breath-taking mountains and the never-ending fields stand in contrast with the limited time-span of man.
"I've grown old, without understanding how I got here," says Ballinger to his friend at one point in the film. When he asks Boyle if he slept with a girl he had a crush on when they were young, Boyle answers the saddest thing about it is that he cannot remember. Far from preaching or attempting to give wise meaning to the mystifying process of aging, Ballinger accepts the fact that he has become wan and vulnerable.
He does not look back on his life with nostalgia. Once a conductor, in full control of his life or his professional orchestra, he now sits in the green fields and conducts a natural orchestra of a humming wind and bell-ringing cows, fantasizing that he is still in control, or simply accepting that he is not, and looking out for the hidden harmonies in life, instead of seeking to create them.
In one of the perhaps iconic scenes of the film, Ballinger and Boyle, immersed in hot water gape at naked Miss Universe (supermodel Mădălina Diana Ghenea) who won a stay at the sanatorium, with her Aphrodite-like curves unhurriedly delving into the water before them, covering a naked breast with one of her hands, whereas exhibiting her covetous features openly. What is she, Ballinger asks, as if she was some alien having landed on their planet.
The film is replete with allegoric and symbolic images of a levitating Buddhist monk, visitors diving simultaneously into hot water as if fatalistically performing an obscure bizarre ritual, possibly alluding to the obligatory rituals of life.
Boyle and his film crew are racking their brains as to what a dying man's last words to his wife should be, and never come up with the perfect ending, alluding to the fact that Ballinger and Boyle though having reached the last stage of their lives, are unsure how to behave and what to do with themselves.
When Boyle's favorite film star and his guarantee to realize the film, performed by an aged Jane Fonda, confesses to Boyle that his last films were of horrible quality and that he will risk tarnishing his reputation if he proceeds with this his rotten script, he briefly wonders if he should renounce his art, but concludes that he would rather continue and produce films even if they were a pale imitation of his grandeur, insinuating that the presence is more relevant than the irretrievable past. The show must go on, even if it is a lousy one.
Sorrentino's impressions evoke the absurdity of life. While sitting in the fields, Ballinger watches a parachutist land suddenly in the middle of nowhere, tangled up in his chute. Or while passing a gloomy hotel corridor, two wheelchair users collide and break in to an argument in the background, while Ballinger's face reflects total apathy.
Sorrentino loves to play with voyeurism, scenes shot from angular perspectives, actors captured behind frames, like a physical instructor imitating in her private room a virtual dancer via her icebox, exhibiting how the virtual world has shaped our life. Only when she engages in an individual pop-tribal fashion of dance, does the camera show her in full.
The seemingly permanent state of youth is far from being romanticized. Sorrentino rather presents a disparate palette of impressions, related to youth and its side effects. Beside the wrinkled and cellulite laden bodies of the old, the camera pans to a naked young woman and a miserable facial expression as no one desires her.
Rachel Weisz plays Ballinger's hysterical daughter who is dumped by her husband because "she is not good in bed." Besides supporting the role of Ballinger, revealing his apathetic nature as a father, while also extracting his well-hidden emotions, she embodies a woman who realized she has aged. While sitting by the pool in a black bikini, exhibiting her still attractive features to a mountain climber, her torn facial expressions and dysfunctional behavior insinuates that she wishes to be desired again as a woman before her body loses its full vigor.
Perhaps the most symbolic image of the film is a shabby Latin American visitor, who undoubtedly embodies football legend Diego Maradonna. Once a football-god, he cannot swim a few rounds without inhaling oxygen afterwards. In a poignant scene he repeatedly shoots a tennis ball with his left foot high up in the air, watching it briefly hovering, before it bounces back, in what is the most beautiful allegory in the film to the nature of youth.
Sorrentino's eye-gasm, an over two-hour film, is long. Too long perhaps. This length challenges delivery of the impressions which could have been more powerful had they been more compact. Near the end the viewer is aware of what the director wishes to say, despite the pouring in of fascinating images one after the other.
Youth is screened in Zawya until Tuesday 26 January
For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture
Short link: