Youth (2015)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Two lifelong friends bond whilst vacationing in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena, Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for his muse Brenda. And where will inspiration lead their younger friend Jimmy, an actor grasping to make sense of his next performance?
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“Youth,” which similarly has its way with Fellini’s “8½” (among other influences), is less focused and more banal, possessed of moments of great lyricism while indicating that Sorrentino is starting to repeat himself.
There’s an existential, borderline absurdist streak running through Youth, too; comparisons to Fellini’s 8½ aren’t that far-fetched.
Fellini’s influence, especially that of “8½,” remains, and while the whole package isn’t as demonstrably bravura as “Il Divo” or “The Great Beauty,” it’s more in touch with human experience.
Much as “The Great Beauty” positioned itself as a sorta-sequel to “La Dolce Vita,” for “Youth” Sorrentino borrows the setting from Fellini’s “8½” and shares The Maestro’s penchant for grotesques.
(Looking at this motley assemblage it is difficult to imagine what sort of career he is meant to have had, though it does establish rather conclusively that Sorrentino has some dim memory of seeing Fellini’s 8½ , as The Great Beauty confirmed his acquaintance with La Dolce Vita .)
His 2013 The Great Beauty was nothing if not La dolce vita for the 2010s; and now we meet up with Youth , which isn't quite as unabashed a clone of 8½ , but let's not go insulting everybody by pretending that a story of artists reflecting on the intersection of their art and their lives during a trip to a spa - one of them a film director having a beastly time casting the leading lady of his newest project - doesn't trigger some extremely strong associations.
Set in an upscale Swiss spa (and shot on location at the Berghotel Schatzalp, the inspiration for Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"), "Youth" is a kind of landlocked "Ship of Fools" following the interactions of several characters during their stay at the resort.
Sorrentino entrecruza sus historias y reúne a las celebridades a la manera de aquellos dramas sentimentales que el cine hollywoodense solía concentrar en un espacio fastuoso, ya fuera Grand hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) o, con menor glamour, La nave del mal (Ship of fools, Stanley Kramer, 1965), según la novela homónima de Katherine Anne Porter.
He won the 2013 foreign-language Oscar for “The Great Beauty,” one of the best movies of the past decade, and follows this up with his second English-language film, ‘Youth,” an equally stunning film visually that evokes memories of Fellini’s “8 1/2” and “Juliet of the Spirits.”
Fonda delivers a high voltage and tantalisingly short cameo; it plays like she’s channelling the spirit of Bette Davis circa What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in a vignette from Mulholland Drive.
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“Youth,” his latest, a lush English-language production, might be described as a hybrid evocation of Fellini’s semi-autobiographical “8A” and Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s scandalous novella “Death in Venice.”
Youth is a good bit like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and has elements of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) — with maybe just a touch of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) — but is ultimately, its own beautiful thing.
And what better locale than the hermetic elements of a spa resort — a setting that unmistakably calls to mind Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, “Last Year at Marienbad” and “8 ½,” among many others.
The provisional nature of the hotel was put to its most haunting use in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, in which every element from memory to topography was thrown into doubt.
Consider his depiction of old flesh longing for young, in which Caine and Keitel, reclining one night in a hot tub, watch in awe as a nude Miss Universe (Mădălina Diana Ghenea) settles in across from them; now compare this to the skin-crawling discomfiture of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love (2012), or Larry Clark stepping in front of the camera to slurp up a teenager’s toe jam in The Smell of Us (2014).
Youth is a good bit like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and has elements of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) — with maybe just a touch of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) — but is ultimately, its own beautiful thing.
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If I had never seen director Paolo Sorrentino’s “ This Must Be the Place ” (2011) or his Academy Award-winning “ The Great Beauty ” (2013), and if my first introduction to the Italian filmmaker had been his new film “Youth,” I honestly believe that I might be swooning over it.
As in his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty , Sorrentino throws a lot of ideas at the screen, though his new film is not as densely loaded, and some themes stick more than others.
Sorrentino, whose 2013 “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, seems enamored of the imagery created by cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and production designer Ludovica Ferrario.
From a corrupt Italian prime minister haunting the dark shadows of his palace in Il Divo, to an adrift mob bag-man living in a hotel in The Consequences of Love, to an aging author lost in a limbo of endless parties in The Great Beauty , Sorrentino’s men find themselves trapped in the spaces of his films like alienated, ruminative little specters.
The latest from Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino once again has old people reflecting and ruminating on life and death in the most posh and photogenic of surroundings, as in his Oscar-winning work of genius The Great Beauty.
If I had to nominate one director in the world as the most overrated right now, I would go with Paolo Sorrentino, whose egregious, overblown “The Great Beauty” predictably won the Oscar for best foreign film.
She strolls in like she just got off the set of Sunset Boulevard as Brenda travels to the Alps for a blistering chat with Mick, and her performance might as well have a big “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” plastered across the screen.
This fails to have a the impact the filmmaker appears to be seeking, perhaps because at this point Fonda brings her own baggage to any film role so you don’t quite buy her as a Gloria Swanson/“Sunset Boulevard” drag queen.