Here's a curate's egg of a movie, which gets points from me for its sheer steadfast refusal to engage with the concerns and styles of contemporary multiplex cinema (compare Scorsese's sometimes craven immersion in them). Coppola has created a fragmented, ruminative, strange and potentially pretentious odyssey through parts of 20th century history, as his mysteriously revivified protagonist struggles with issues of love, mortality and the roots of human language over the course of three decades. There's something of Nietzsche's superman, and of course Goethe's Faust, about the professor who almost commits himself to writing a masterpiece of human comprehension, but is forever failing due to his all too human concerns with fellow feeling and that old devil called love.
The Nietzschean theme has haunted Coppola's work before - compare Kurtz in Apocalypse Now or the title character of Tucker. The film made me think that Coppola's central thematic concern is that of individual loneliness - that striving to achieve greatness which puts a man (it's always a man) outside of genuine relationships, destined in the grasp of achievement to lose his true love, who stands for his soul. Michael Corleone and Count Dracula are both worthwhile comparison characters. Youth Without Youth is haunting and fertile, without being a wholly successful film. But it's refusal to be an accessible contemporary product kind of makes me like it more than it perhaps deserves...
The Nietzschean theme has haunted Coppola's work before - compare Kurtz in Apocalypse Now or the title character of Tucker. The film made me think that Coppola's central thematic concern is that of individual loneliness - that striving to achieve greatness which puts a man (it's always a man) outside of genuine relationships, destined in the grasp of achievement to lose his true love, who stands for his soul. Michael Corleone and Count Dracula are both worthwhile comparison characters. Youth Without Youth is haunting and fertile, without being a wholly successful film. But it's refusal to be an accessible contemporary product kind of makes me like it more than it perhaps deserves...