Headline, May15, 2013

'''YOUTH -WITHOUT- YOUTH'''

Serious people would continue to argue about its meaning. Many people have seen the movie twice, even thrice, but just don't know what to make of it!

This title could so easily be most apt, for the youth of the developing countries. But in this Headline post it is not!

Youth Without Youth  is one of the strangest mainstream movies of the last many years.This movie is the true liberation of Director Francis Ford Coppola, completely on his own terms. So watch the brilliance of the narrative as it dances along the sometimes slippery borders between waking and dreaming, and reality and imagination,  and being and not being  -the parameters of that slippery thing we call human consciousness.

If that's not theme enough, the film also bats around notions having to do with time and language. Plus Nazis, if it sounds Eastern European, it is: Cappola adopted the film from a Romanian Novella and shot it in Romania and Bulgaria, in English,  with a largely Romanian cast and crew.

The protagonist   -a 70 years old Professor at the end of a bitter life who becomes 35 again after being hit by lightening   -is played by the gifted but not exactly bankable English Actor Tim Roth. His co-star, as the woman the professor loved in his youth, and whom he meets in a different incarnation in his second youth, is the Romanian Actress Alexandra Maria Clara, who played Hitler's secretary in the 2004 German film Downfall.

Matt Damon is in one scene as an American spy. Bruno Granz, who many years ago starred as the angel in Wim Wenders's  Wings of Desire, may be the other cast member known to a measurable number of you.

Coppola has made a defiantly old-fashioned movie in the sense that it would probably have found a larger audience if it had come out alongside Blow-up in 1966. The philosophical stuff is a hash but the less heady parts of the story are moving, exploring as they do questions of work and love.

The film as a whole unfolds with a feverish yet precise urgency  -the work of a Great Master. It's as if the Coppola who made the first two Godfather Films, with their exquisite sense of control, somehow merged with the Coppola who rode the lazy last third of Apocalypse.

Youth Without Youth is exactly the film he wanted to make, and it must be; betrays not a molecule of commercial calculation, and for that it's heroic. Coppola for sure is no stranger to grandiosity, bunkum, overreach, self-immolation, and red-ink.

Don Coppola is the independent Film Maker! He financed the movie himself.  Re-Bourne!

Happy Independence Day, Sir!

And, so don't miss the masterpiece :  Youth Without Youth is a romantic parable with a strong metaphysical bent.

With respectful and loving dedication to Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Kamini Kaushal, Sunil Dutt, Raj Kumar, Bilraj Sahni, Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachan, Mohammed Ali, Zeba, Rajesh Khanna, Shamim Ara and Mussarat Nazir.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless