Youth Without Youth

[MacGuffin]

Francis Ford Coppola, a Kid to Watch
Source: New York Times

YOUTH Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum — like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Mr. Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language and human identity — but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Seeing "Youth Without Youth" for the first time this summer, I tried to resist the impulse to imagine parallels between the filmmaker and his hero. Was Mr. Coppola trying to recapture something of his own youth in telling this story? Was Matei's state — a predicament as well as a blessing — also, in some way, the director's own? Did this project, a return to filmmaking after a long hiatus, represent an attempt to turn back the clock and start again?

Having been trained to be skeptical of easy biographical interpretations, I dismissed such questions as too obvious to take seriously. My high-minded, theoretically correct determination to avoid them did not last long, however. When I spoke to Mr. Coppola on the phone a few weeks later, he was quick to suggest the connection himself. "I'm really a lot like the man in the movie," he said.

Not literally of course. The plot of "Youth Without Youth" is an otherworldly blend of moods and genres. At first Matei's story, which begins in Bucharest in 1938, seems like a World War II-era spy thriller, complete with Nazi agents in trench coats and a femme fatale with swastikas on her garters. But the political intrigue dissipates once Matei falls in love with a young woman who seems able to travel backward in time, and the movie settles into a curious blend of romance, mystery and philosophical speculation.

In its calm, formal assurance, in the way it effortlessly tackles difficult shot sequences and narrative tangles, in its almost classical elegance and its reflective tone, "Youth Without Youth" is evidently the work of a master, a mature artist who has probably forgotten more about making movies than the entire current student body at U.C.L.A. film school will ever know. (Mr. Coppola, who is 68, received his master of fine arts degree in directing there in 1967.)

But in other ways the movie feels like the work of a much younger man. It bristles with restless, perhaps overreaching intellectual ambition, and without being overtly autobiographical, it feels intensely and earnestly personal.

All of which seems, to borrow a word that Mr. Coppola uses frequently, quite deliberate. As he sees it, "Youth Without Youth" (set to open Dec. 14) is not so much a return to form as a new beginning. "I wanted to make a movie the way a film student would," he said.

He was introduced to Eliade's story by the religious scholar Wendy Doniger, a childhood friend of his and the Mircea Eliade professor at the University of Chicago. With a modest bankroll provided by his successful California winery, Mr. Coppola shot "Youth Without Youth" in Romania, recruiting most of his cast and crew from that country's flourishing pool of cinematic talent. He also limited himself to equipment that could be transported in a single specially outfitted truck, a technique he had developed when working on his thesis film, "You're a Big Boy Now," four decades ago.

Shooting "Youth Without Youth" was "guerrilla filmmaking, real independent filmmaking," he said with audible enthusiasm. And throughout our conversation he took evident delight in presenting himself — one of the old lions of the New Hollywood; an Oscar and Palme d'Or winner; a man whose professional life has been a 40-year epic of triumph and catastrophe; Francis Ford Coppola, for goodness sake! — as a young upstart with a gleam in his eye and a camera on his shoulder.

"My dream is to have the career I wanted when I was 18," he said. "When I started, I never thought I was going to be a successful Hollywood director. When I was young, I got to have the big career, and I'm hoping that now I can have the little one."

The big career offers, among other things, an incomparable case study in some of the paradoxes that define modern American movies. Taking early note of Mr. Coppola in "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968," Andrew Sarris remarked, rather guardedly, that he was "probably the first reasonably talented and sensibly adaptable directorial talent to emerge from a university curriculum in filmmaking."

But even as he had pursued his academic studies, Mr. Coppola was also directing "Dementia 13" for Roger Corman, the cheapskate exploitation impresario whose production company served as a kind of unaccredited training school for budding auteurs.

As his talent flowered in the 1970s, Mr. Coppola came to embody some of the tensions inherent in the idea of the director as auteur. As Mr. Sarris had articulated it, the auteur theory was partly a means of identifying movies produced under the aegis of the old studio system as legitimate and coherent works of art. It was understood that they were also, nearly always, works done for hire. And of course the work that is likely to remain Mr. Coppola's masterpiece, notwithstanding any changes in critical fashion, was a project he took on for money, and for Paramount, while he was trying to finish "The Conversation."

The first two "Godfather" movies, along with "The Conversation," will forever quiet any skepticism about whether or not Mr. Coppola is a great filmmaker. Subsequent turns in the big career, however, are often taken as cautionary tales about what happens when artistic ambitions grow too large. The long, difficult making of "Apocalypse Now" is conventionally grouped with other late-'70s New Hollywood flameouts, even though the film itself was both a critical and a commercial success.

But Mr. Coppola's reputation was nonetheless dented, in the '80s and '90s, by other grandiose, ill-fated projects, notably his dreamy Las Vegas fantasia "One From the Heart" (1982) and "The Cotton Club" (1984), a period gangster epic that was sometimes more exciting to read about in magazine exposés than to watch on screen. And of course there was "The Godfather: Part III."

But all of these films, for all their flaws, demonstrate the talent and adaptability that Mr. Sarris had noticed at the start. If none quite hangs together, each one includes some extraordinary filmmaking.

In retrospect it seems that Mr. Coppola's sheer technical virtuosity — in particular his ability to bring large, crowded scenes into intimate dramatic focus — has been taken for granted. And his missteps have been dissected with an eagerness that distracts from a record of pretty solid accomplishment. Between "One From the Heart" and "The Cotton Club," Mr. Coppola released "The Outsiders" and "Rumble Fish," exquisite, modest adaptations of S. E. Hinton novels that have lost little of their power over the years. These movies also, not incidentally, demonstrate Mr. Coppola's ability to bring out the best in actors. Have Patrick Swayze and Mickey Rourke ever been better?

Mr. Coppola's record through the '80s — at the moment everybody's least favorite decade in the history of American cinema — is disappointing only when held up against his work in the '70s. Nobody will argue that "Peggy Sue Got Married" (1986), "Gardens of Stone" (1987) and "Tucker: The Man and his Dream" (1988) are masterpieces, but they hold up pretty well. Kathleen Turner, James Caan and Jeff Bridges are all in good form, and if the movies were underappreciated in their time, it was in no small part because the man who directed them had, not so long before, made "The Conversation" and the first two "Godfather" pictures in a three-year span.

In other words, it may have been the burden of the big career that made it hard for Mr. Coppola to carve out a medium-size career as a maker of moderately ambitious, high-quality commercial movies. So after "The Rainmaker" in 1997 — another decent, well-acted, sharply directed movie with no evident aspirations to be anything more — he seemed to enter a phase of semi-retirement, devoting himself to winemaking and proud papahood. The first time I met him, in Cannes in 2001, when he was showing the expanded version of "Apocalypse Now," he seemed at times more interested in talking about his filmmaker children, Roman and Sofia, than about his own work.

And now, as he talks about the reawakening of his teenage aspirations, he sounds like the youngest Coppola of them all. For his next film he will take his bare-bones outfit to Argentina. Without elaborating, he describes the project as autobiographical. Which is just what a talented, ambitious indie filmmaker might say.

In 1968 Mr. Sarris concluded his short entry on Francis Ford Coppola (in the section of "The American Cinema" called "Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers") with a prediction that was prophetic at the time and may still be: "Coppola may be heard from more decisively in the future."

[MacGuffin]

Teaser Trailer here.

[Pubrick]

youth without youth
without youth without
youth without youth

[MacGuffin]

[matt35mm]

Eye-catching.

Makes it seem like Francis Ford Coppola stars it in, though, with his name above the title like that.

I also remember him saying in the Godfather commentary that he's been proud to be able to put the author's name in the titles of his films (Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, John Grisham's The Rainmaker).  Why not Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth?

The film looks beautiful, though (it was shot digitally, right?).  I am looking forward to it!

[ElPandaRoyal]

Eye-catching.

Makes it seem like Francis Ford Coppola stars it in, though, with his name above the title like that.

I also remember him saying in the Godfather commentary that he's been proud to be able to put the author's name in the titles of his films (Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, John Grisham's The Rainmaker).  Why not Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth?

The film looks beautiful, though (it was shot digitally, right?).  I am looking forward to it!

Yeah, I think so, and the result seems amazing. I don't know what the hell this is going to be, but I'm actually quite excited about it. I mean, how many of us really believe Coppola still has it in him?

[Pubrick]

I mean, how many of us really believe Coppola still has it in him?

everything he's said in interviews lately has indicated that the man is REBORN. also, this is a really brilliant story, about a man who is REBORN. and thirdly, he has chosen an amazing cast including two of my favourite actresses, michelle williams and alexandra maria lara (she wasn't given much to do in Control, but dammit if i couldn't keep my eyes off her).. so at least one part of his body is still working.

and after the debacle that Across the Universe is turning out to be, i'm wagering double or nothing on this baby, papa needs a new pair of shoes.

shoes without shoes
without shoes without
shoes without shoes

[ElPandaRoyal]

shoes without shoes
without shoes without
shoes without shoes

Almost as great as CMBB

[Pozer]

i like what vinny gambini is calling it: the two yutes.

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

[Gold Trumpet]

Oh man, Alexandra Maria Lara is gorgeous. If I wasn't committed to my current AV, I'd be Kal and make her my Kristen Bell.

[MacGuffin]

First Coppola film in decade premieres

It is Francis Ford Coppola's first movie in a decade, and the Oscar-winning director said Saturday that audiences should be in no hurry before deciding if "Youth Without Youth" is good or bad.

"Youth Without Youth" is Coppola's first movie since "The Rainmaker" in 1997. It was having its public premiere Saturday evening at the Rome Film Festival.

At an earlier screening for the press, reactions were mixed, and Coppola asked people to see it more than once.

"When you venture into new territories ... you know that it's different than 'Spider-Man' or 'Shrek' or other films that are immediately met with success. So, part of being an artist who wants to look at new areas (is knowing that) it will take a while for people to be familiar with the film," he said. "I only ask you to think that my film was interesting."

"Youth Without Youth" tells a metaphysical story about a 70-year-old Romanian professor of linguistics who miraculously becomes younger after being struck by lightning. The accident gives him abnormal intellectual abilities which attract the attention of the Nazis as World World II looms.

Turned into a fugitive, he is also tormented by dreams of his lost love.

With intensity, Tim Roth plays the professor struggling with old age and the promises of a new youth.

The movie "begins with an older man who feels his life has not led to his goal, his desire to finish a great work and he is still haunted by dreams of the young girl he foolishly lost when he was younger," Coppola told reporters. "He wakes up and weeps, as I'm sure many old people do who find themselves alone."

The film, shot in Romania, is adapted from a novella by the Romanian philosopher-author Mircea Eliade.

[modage]

It is Francis Ford Coppola's first movie in a decade, and the Oscar-winning director said Saturday that audiences should be in no hurry before deciding if "Youth Without Youth" is good or bad.

"Now everybody knows critics hated the film.  What this article pre-supposes is: maybe they didn't?"

[MacGuffin]

Coppola seeks lost youth with return to film making

Director Francis Ford Coppola says he has a lot in common with Dominic Matei, the protagonist of his first film in 10 years, "Youth Without Youth."

That may sound surprising coming from the Oscar-winning maker of "Apocalypse Now" and "The Godfather" trilogy, since Matei is an elderly Romanian linguistics professor who feels he has wasted his life, lost the woman he loved and failed to produce a great academic work.

Just before the outbreak of World War Two, Matei -- played by British actor Tim Roth -- is struck by lightning and becomes young again, getting a second chance to fulfill his dreams.

In the production notes, Coppola says that when he came across the book on which the film is based, he was, a bit like its main character, "beginning to feel at the end of the road," frustrated by his inability to finish the screenplay for his long-cherished utopia project "Megalopolis."

"I was trying to write and find myself as a writer and find my place in the movie business, because I did not want to be kind of an entertainment director as I had been, I wanted to be someone who did only personal films," Coppola, 68, told reporters after a press screening of the new film.

"I never as a young man expected to have the kind of success which came ultimately from the Godfather and I always was nostalgic (...)

"It was only later when I was older that I thought, well, if I had the life of an older director when I was young, maybe I can have the life of a younger director when I am old and that took me to the subject matter of Mircea Eliade's book," he said.

The film, which premieres on Saturday at the Rome festival, is based on a short novel by Romanian writer Eliade.

MIXED REACTION

Coppola financed the film with his own Californian winery business and went to shoot in Romania as if "I was making a student film," with an almost entirely local cast and crew and a specially fitted van to carry all the equipment.

The result is a complex, elaborate story mixing the ingredients of a spy thriller, including mad Nazi scientists studying genetic mutations, with philosophical meditations on time, language and reincarnation.

Critics' reaction at Saturday's press screening was muted, with some feeling the film was erratic and over ambitious.

But Coppola, who after his early triumphs has had his fair share of flops -- in the 1980s his production company was taken over by creditors -- said artists should never worry about the public's knee-jerk reaction to their works.

"When you venture into new territory, when you embrace an author like Eliade you know that it is different than 'Spider Man' and 'Shrek' and other films that are immediately met with success," he said.

"It takes time for the public to decide whether it was good or bad. Are you aware that for a film like, for example, 'Apocalypse Now' they are only making up their mind now?"

Asked whether he would consider revisiting his 1970s classics or making "The Godfather IV," Coppola categorically ruled that out.

"I don't know why I would ever want to do that, I never wanted to make more than Godfather one ... I feel any remake is a waste of energy and resources."

[modage]

ATTN: NYC
Youth without Youth
With Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Roth, and Alexandra Maria Lara in person
Monday, December 3, 7:00 p.m.
At The Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan

2007, 124 mins. 35mm print courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. With Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara. Francis Ford Coppola makes an exciting return to personal filmmaking with his first movie in ten years, a meditative and suspenseful thriller about an elderly Romanian professor who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. "It is about time, consciousness, and the dream-like nature of reality," said the director.
Tickets $12 Museum members/free for Sponsor level and above/$18 non-members. Buy tickets online or call 718.784.4520.

http://www.movingimage.us/site/screenings/index.html

i'm going to this, so if you're going let me know.