Paolo Sorrentino’s follow-up to his much-acclaimed The Great Beauty (2013), Youth revisits that film’s defining terrain, again depicting ageing prodigies immersed in a posh zone filled with weird and frenetic human types. Here, that zone is a health resort in the Swiss Alps, where composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and his lifelong friend, film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) have come to spend a holiday together. Ballinger is retired, whilst Boyle is planning a final, summative work with a squad of eager young screenwriters. Another guest at the resort is self-consciously serious American actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), who feels kinship with Ballinger as both are most famous for their concessions to populist, popular work – Tree for a film called Mr Q where he played a robot, and Ballinger for a suite called “Simple Songs” he wrote for his soprano wife to perform, which is now so beloved that an emissary of Buckingham Palace (Alex Macqueen) comes to beg him to conduct a performance of it for the Queen and Prince Philip. Ballinger’s daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), who works as his assistant, is also married to Mick’s son Julian (Ed Stoppard), but their union comes to an abrupt end when Julian announces he’s leaving her to get married to pop star Paloma Faith. These hapless characters kick about the resort, mulling over life, love, and art amidst a swirl of fellow guests, including Diego Maradona (Rolly Serrano), who’s grown so corpulent his wife drags around an oxygen bottle after them.
Where The Great Beauty presented itself unabashedly as an update of La Dolce Vita (1960) and Sorrentino made a play for recognition as Fellini’s spiritual godson, Youth takes equally clear inspiration from 8½ (1963), which likewise depicted a director hiding out in a health resort. But 8½ was concerned with the nature of creative crisis in an artist at the top of his game, whilst Youth concerns itself with life’s ecliptic years and the feeling, blending flitting anxiety and meditative distraction, of being left only with legacy. Fellini’s surrealist flourishes give way here to a more deadpan approach, albeit no less absurd, as Sorrentino’s camera and cutting presents vistas of all-too-mortal human forms, some old, some young, parading around the resort. A young prostitute (Gabriella Belisario) makes a living waiting in the lobby for any old man desperate for a touch of youth. An equally young masseuse (Luna Zimic Mijovic) who prefers language of flesh to voice squeezes and plies angst from the bodies of charges, including Ballinger, and then expels it playing a dance video game on her own. The winner of the Miss Universe pageant (Madalina Diana Ghenea) comes to the resort, having won a free stay as part of her prize, and she quickly shakes Tree up when he starts patronising her over her liking of robot movies in general and Mr Q in particular. Meanwhile Tree himself prepares for a role, and appears one morning swathed in full make-up and costume to calmly saunter and breakfast under the bewildered and appalled gaze of fellow guests: Adolf Hitler.
Youth is littered with good scenes and some genuinely funny comedy. A fun if rather precious interlude early in the film sees Ballinger conducting music in his mind accumulated from the ambient sounds of a cow pasture he beholds. A nightmare in the mind of heartbroken, strung-out Lena presents an over-the-top approximation of a video clip, with Faith as a devilishly shrieking temptress atop Julian’s careening sports car. A running joke sees Ballinger and Boyle making bets over a frosty, unspeaking couple, whose apparent relationship takes some stimulating turns before their eyes. The most compelling moments are more serious. Distraught Lena coldly dismisses her father’s protestations of understanding with a lacerating account of the injuries he caused her mother by pursuing his whims, including a brief fling with a man. Jane Fonda turns up as Boyle’s frequent collaborator and muse Brenda Morel, to deliver bad news, that she’s pulling out of his next work because she wants to collect a square paycheque on a TV series and because she thinks his work has turned bad and death-obsessed. Boyle is deeply offended and the two exchange wounding barbs: Boyle accosts Brenda as ungrateful, whilst she refuses any feeling of obligation to her great director as someone who might owe him a good career but not the will to gain that career. Fonda plays a broad caricature of a ballsy, brassy Hollywood star, but she brings dynamism to the role, and the scene between her and Keitel offers just about the only genuine dramatic meat in the whole film: for a brief moment, Youth burns hot with the grim beauty of larger-than-life personalities with history suddenly colliding.
In spite of its occasional strong moments, though, taken as a work in whole Youth counts as one of the bigger belly-flops I’ve seen from a major director in recent years. Sorrentino’s work has threatened in the past to descend into archness and obviousness, and Youth goes the full distance. The oppositions and reversals are either wince-inducingly predictable – Miss Universe turns out to be brilliant; a tween girl proves to be the one person who likes one of Tree’s arty films – or corny, as when Boyle finally hires the young prostitute, but only to hold hands, and when the Buddhist monk who camps on the lawn of the resort and attracts Ballinger’s scepticism levitates when no-one’s looking. If there’s supposed to be a substantial meaning to these touches I can’t make them out, nor in the subplot of Julian dumping Lena for Faith, which doesn’t really lead anywhere; it just proves a random gag riffing on the appeal of celebrity, and showing off the pull of Sorrentino’s prestige. The constant pining and reminiscing Ballinger and Boyle indulge, thinking back to their lost loves and fading memories, is supposed to be profound, but instead comes across like an overblown sitcom episode. Caine and Keitel are such fine and committed actors, carrying the memories of when they were younger, more volatile presences and now blessed with the peculiar, sanguine poise that often comes to such men when they grow aged and becalmed, that they almost fool you into thinking there’s substance to their characters here.
But really they’re just avatars for themes, most of them worked ragged already, particularly the idea of the worshipped artistic creator who’s left most of their human relations in fragments. A visit Ballinger makes to his decrepit, senescent wife strains for pathos that’s unearned because just about everything concerning their relationship has been left vague, and Sorrentino can’t help but go for the same note of excessive grotesqueness he struck with the ancient nun at the end of The Great Beauty. When Sorrentino tries to illustrate Boyle’s crisis as he’s surrounded by visions of various characters from his films, the result is embarrassingly clumsy, a collection of caricatured movie types offered in a manner that resembles bad improv theatre. It doesn’t help that Sorrentino’s ideas here as well as his references feel distressingly shop-worn. The comedy of detached celebrity in a swank place echoes Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and Somewhere (2009), with a strong hint of Death in Venice (1971). The enquiries into the schisms of contemporary culture and the messy drives and bonds of creativity echo much recent filmmaking, including both Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman, or; The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Olivier Assayas’ The Clouds of Sils Maria (both 2014). There’s none of Assayas’ penetrating and thorough approach or ambiguity, however. Youth begs to be called Euro-Birdman, swapping that film’s erratic but propulsive cosmopolitan energy for a mocking brand of chic. At least Birdman mined its claptrap cliches for physical comedy and a real sense of artistic compulsion. Youth sits around wishing it knew what to do.
Luca Bigazzi’s exquisitely crystalline shots realise the pretensions of Sorrentino’s visual patterns, gazing upon human bodies at once raw and abstracted, sometimes in artfully arrayed patinas of light and dark, other times scanned with careless directness. Such shots all but beg critics to consider Sorrentino’s work here as a profound and gutsy statement about the human form in youth and age, life and death. But it’s all remarkably prissy, undercut by Sorrentino failing to properly contemplate either of his main characters as frail vessels in this way, and also by readily adopting a dirty old man’s perspective when contemplating more pulchritudinous forms. Perhaps the most interesting image in a film where the state of the body is an obsessive point of refrain comes when contemplating Maradona as fallen god of athleticism now lugging about a bulk of fat, and yet with remnant physical genius still apparent as he happily bounces a tennis ball off his foot: Sorrentino says more with this image than all the words in the film combined. Moreover, Sorrentino’s career up until now had been given depth by his solid grounding in the specifics of Italian political and social life, as with his terrific portrait of Giulio Andreotti, Il Divo (2008): here, he’s adrift in a place that feels disconnected, trying to turn that very drift into the matter of his art but instead only coming up with overripe eccentricity and navel-gazing. He’s not even bothered to explain the fact Ballinger and Boyle are supposed to have been pals since childhood but have different accents. Even the director’s trademark of staging spectacles of public revelry that gather incantatory power, a gift that shocked the various tableaux of The Great Beauty to life, is muted here. Although the film finally leaves its static setting and makes a play for a sense of both real tragedy and grace, it still feels wrapped in cotton wool, and the finale, a staging of Ballinger’s signature work, utterly fails to persuade. Youth is a well-made and mildly diverting film, but not much more.
