Coppola's additions make Eliade's ontological burgoo just another case of too many cooks.
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The origin of language. Time. Fate. Existence. Reincarnation.
These are big issues--ones that intrigue people like Romanian linguistics professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) and Mircea Eliade, the professor of religion who wrote Youth without Youth.
I haven't read Eliade's novella, but I have read and enjoyed his thoughtful consideration of sacred and secular space in "The Sacred and the Profane," a scholarly treatise on man's religious impulse. And I've read Eliade's "Myth of the Eternal Return," which contemplates, among other things, what it means to exist in time. "Youth without Youth" is a fictionalized reconsideration of that book. But while I found Eliade's essays to be lucid and highly readable, I have to say that "Youth without Youth" tries too hard to be profound and provocative. What could have been an interesting test-case of metaphysics turns out to be a dull, slow-moving glacier of a movie instead.
That's too bad, because "Youth without Youth" is the first major film from Francis Ford Coppola since "The Rainmaker" (1997), and it was financed by profits from the Coppola vineyards. In this case, he couldn't reap what he had sown. Though Coppola clearly was fascinated by the ontological questions at the heart of Eliade's fiction and while he constructs a film that's beautiful to watch, it's also pretentious, tedious, and poorly reasoned. The narrative is so disjointed that it feels like two separate films cobbled into one. I've heard it described as an art-house film which demands a great deal of its audience, a difficult film which is so mentally challenging that the average person can't understand it. Well, as rude (or arrogant) as it seems, I have to say that the emperor has no clothes. "Youth without Youth" is more muddle than puzzle. It begins with a clichéd plot about Nazis trying to track down the professor to learn his secrets, and ends like a kind of time-traveling "Sybil." And trust me, it's not nearly as exciting as those comparisons make it seem.
Long, lingering takes and melodramatic moments punctuate this film far more than the few elements of intrigue or peril. Mihai Malaimare, Jr.'s cinematography is wonderfully poetic, as is original music from Osvaldo Golijov, and "Youth without Youth" is visually sweeping. But Coppola says he added a few elements to Eliade's short fiction, including sections on Buddhist thought, and what begins as poetry soon turns as pretentious as a poetry reading.
It's not the fault of the actors, mind you. Tim Roth does a fine job as Dominic, the professor we're introduced to in 1938 when, as a near-senile man in his 70's who weeps at the realization that his life is over, Dominic is struck by lighting--his body lifted into the air and badly charred. The umbrella he was carrying is a flaming skeleton. He, meanwhile, is taken to a hospital where doctors wrap him in a full-body bandage that may as well have been a cocoon--for what emerges is a man that the giggling nurses can't believe is a septuagenarian. That's because a strange phenomenon has happened. Rather than killing him, the bolt of lightning somehow reset his clock, reversing the aging process so that he becomes a man who looks to be in his mid-30's instead. Old teeth spat out give way to new "baby teeth" and new hair grows. He's a marvel who, of course, becomes of great interest to the doctors in Bucharest . . . and as a result, draws the interest of the Nazis the country has aligned itself with. It turns out that one of Hitler's top scientists, Josef Rudolf (André Hennicke), has been conducting experiments using high-voltage electrical charges because he suspected something like this could happen. Now, Rudolf wants to "examine" Dominic.
In a way, it's a pretty standard plot that has Dominic going underground, learning to live like a secret agent in order to evade the Nazis. But this double life passes by so quickly that you'd swear you missed something. A professor (Bruno Ganz) disappears almost as quickly.
In flashbacks we see hints of Dominic's older (younger) life, his past love Laura. And as he lies in bed, recovering, we get the familiar gimmick of a double-something we've seen since the first cartoons that had little devils and angels battling for a character's attentions. Is it the embodiment of conscience? A suggestion that the self has been split in two by lightning, the old self and the new, with the new really being the old? Even Coppola doesn't provide a satisfactory answer in his commentary. That doubling continues throughout the rest of the film--though thankfully there's at least just one other Dominic, instead of the multiple Jack Sparrows that "Pirates of the Caribbean" fans had to endure in the third installment.
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