YOUTH 123 minutes. See listings. Rating: NNNN
Two old friends, retired composer Fred (Michael Caine) and film auteur Mick (Harvey Keitel), meet at a swanky Swiss resort and muse about aging and their fears of diminishing creative powers.
Sounds like a cliché – and potentially creepy given the nubile young women cavorting all over the place – but in the hands of the great Paolo Sorrentino (of The Great Beauty, last year’s foreign-language film Oscar winner), it’s a wonder.
Working with his long-time collaborator, gifted cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, writer/director Sorrentino fashions images so spectacular that they can be savoured without David Lang’s beautiful soundtrack. So when his screenplay occasionally goes slack – there are a few too many sequences with Mick trying to finish a script with his team of young writers – he makes up for it with another jaw-dropping visual.
The cast, including Rachel Weisz as Fred’s daughter and assistant and Paul Dano as an alienated film star, is excellent, especially Keitel as the film lion losing his roar. And there’s a brief but ferocious performance by Jane Fonda as a once famous movie star.
As for the hot young things at the resort, a sequence in which Miss Universe hits the baths while Mick and Fred are soaking in them is handled with an exquisite tenderness that permeates the entire film.
