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DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola
FEATURING: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke, Alexandra Pirici
PLOT: In 1938 Bucharest, 70-year-old Dominic Matei is struck by lightning, becomes decades younger and develops psychic powers.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Every now and then, Francis Ford Coppola gets to make a movie his way, unconstrained by the demands of capitalism or the limitations of collaboration. Think of the studio-destroying One From the Heart, the self-indulgently autobiographical Tucker: The Man and His Dream, or the demented epic Apocalypse Now. With big ideas, gloriously pretentious dialogue, radical shifts in tone, and a determination to Speak His Truth, Youth Without Youth is cut from a similar cloth: pure Coppola, raw and unfiltered.
COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola is currently in post-production on what he says will be the capstone to his career, a final epic called Megalopolis. He has cashed in his winemaking fortune to produce the film with a nine-figure budget and own it outright. He enlisted an all-star cast to bring his script, which has been camera-ready for years, to life. Beyond the vaguest of plot descriptions, little is yet known about the work that could be the great filmmaker’s final cinematic statement. But I have some suspicions about what to expect from Megalopolis. Because, you see, I’ve watched Youth Without Youth.
After the old-style credits with sweeping theme, we meet Dominic, who is old, hopeless, and suicidal. His book about the origin of human language will never be finished, his dreams are plagued by memories of Laura, the woman who pushed him away because he gave more attention to his intellectual passions than to her, and the world is rushing towards cataclysm. It’s pure happenstance that a final trip back to Bucharest leads to his fateful encounter with a bolt of lightning. (Some wild dialogue suggests divine intervention, but Coppola’s not down for anything as mundane as that.)
Once he’s hospitalized, it takes a while to get back to Dominic, because the movie is intensely interested in the accident itself: the strange process of re-growth, complete with new teeth. The snarky hospital attendants. The tedium of confirming his true identity and crafting a new one. That’s part of Youth Without Youth’s methodology. It’s not metaphorical, symbolic, or satirical. Coppola really is interested in the fundamentals of what would happen to this guy who was hit by lightning and made 30 years younger.
Roughly halfway through the film, Youth Without Youth begins to resemble nothing so much as a superhero origin story, with Dominic using his powers to escape the Nazis’ designs on the ability to extend life. It’s almost comically literal; we suspect a woman staying at the clinic might have ulterior motives once we see that she has a swastika stitched into her garter belt and a lovingly embossed illustrated edition of Mein Kampf tucked under the bed. And the scenes with the unsubtly named Dr. Josef Rudolf could have been clipped from Captain America: The First Avenger. But even as he hides out in Switzerland, bouncing from city to city while continuing to draw attention to himself, another plot is attempting to draw him in. This one is a World War II spy thriller, complete with a cameo by a Major Hollywood Star trying to lure Dominic to support the Allies. But he dodges that just as deftly.
Just as they start to pick up momentum, Dominic’s wartime adventures come to a close, and we turn instead to a curious kind of love story. On a stroll through the forest, Dominic chances to meet Veronica, a young woman who is nearly the spitting image of his long-lost Laura. And wouldn’t you know it, moments after their chance encounter, she gets struck by lightning, a fortuitous occurrence because it both enables the couple to spend more time together and gifts her with the ability to channel personages from long ago, speaking in their forgotten tongues. As she goes further and further back into the primordial beginnings of language, Dominic finds himself in a true predicament, because while each person Veronica embodies brings him closer to completing his long-gestating book, so too does she get nearer to her mortal end.
What’s especially odd about Youth Without Youth is Coppola’s almost charming indifference to the niceties of narrative. Aside from lavishing attention on the more arcane parts of his story, he weaves in other elements with just enough information to tease the audience, and nothing more. For example, Dominic has a second self, half expository and half critic, who drops in at key moments for a nudge. There’s also a hint that Dominic might be the vanguard of a new breed of superhuman. Coppola doesn’t need to make good on any of these side paths, because he’s ultimately making a movie for himself. It’s very likely he could have gone on for months and even years adding scenes as the whim took him. (Legendary editor Walter Murch helped whittle a much longer cut down to a manageable two hours and change.) What is unequivocally true, and what seems to irritate the critics who hate this movie the most, is how utterly uncompromising a production it is, how thoroughly uninterested in the audience it appears to be.
Youth Without Youth is a mess, but it’s a big, beautiful mess. Coppola’s camera imbues the locations (mostly Romania) with classic beauty, and the production is lush with rich costumes and sweeping orchestral themes. Anchoring the production is an unexpectedly graceful leading-man turn from Roth, who has to turn from impenetrable philosophical koans to ardent declarations of love on a dime. It’s a lot of excellent elements in service of a gleefully unfocused tale.
This all feeds into my suspicions about Megalopolis. I think it will be sprawling puzzle box of a story, with excellent performances, top-flight production design, arcane flights of fancy and more winding paths than a haunted forest. Because Francis Coppola does not care. He’s old, he’s well-heeled, and he’ll make whatever film he feels like. He’s done it before, and Youth Without Youth is the proof.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia, who mused that it was “quite possibly [Coppola’s] weirdest film and ranks with the more bizarre parts of ‘The Conversation,’ ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Rumble Fish’… enough surprises to keep it weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)