After his Oscar winning critical darling The Great Beauty, Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino delivers another masterpiece with Youth, a meditation on what it means to grow old and reflect on lives lived.
Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a retired orchestra conductor on holidays with his assistant and daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz) in the Swiss Alps. He passes his time with best friend and film director, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), who is planning his magnum opus with a group of young screenwriters. The two elder gentlemen reflect on their lives and shared experiences of growing old before a series of events causes them both to reconsider how they feel about themselves in the present and in the past.
Sorrentino is an idiosyncratic filmmaker whose touch is very much a required taste. Like Fellini (who this film owes a considerable debt), he approaches his material with a seriocomic, absurdist angle with dashes of surrealism. He employs a deliberately over the top style that allows him to get away with otherwise overbearing dialogue and a heavy handedness that would sink any other work by a lesser filmmaker. Like Fellini, he balances a tightrope of style with catastrophic pretentiousness below him and the apex of his art at the end of the walk, but when it works, as it does here, it does indeed reach the very zenith of the possibilities of cinema.
Along with Sorrentino’s execution of the film, the performances are exquisite and in perfect harmony with the film’s style. Caine is reliably flawless and particularly effective in his strong dramatic moments, and Weisz as his daughter is given some choice moments and plays them to their full potential. The revelation though is Keitel. Not because he hasn’t continually shown his strength as an actor over his forty year career, but because he’s so rarely given roles this strong in big movies anymore. With Caine, he gives a searingly brave performance which God-willing will find him his way to a much deserved Oscar.
Set in a stunning chateau bordered by Swiss vistas of the Alps (which are magically photographed, particularly in the night scenes by Luca Bigazzi), featuring some fine music (including Mark Kozelek giving an onscreen performance), Youth is a stylish, emotionally gripping film, which may just be the finest of the year.
Youth is in cinemas from 26th December through StudioCanal.
