returning to life
by Douglas Messerli
Paolo Sorrentino (screenwriter and director) Youth / 2015
Somewhat
like his previous film, The Great Beauty,
Paolo Sorrentino’s new work, Youth is,
in fact, a thing of great beauty that takes us on a meditation of an older man
observing the pandered young and old among us. And in that voyage, we are
seduced—very much the way Federico Fellini used to seduce us—by the hedonism
and perversity of the rich and famous. Films such as Youth and Fellini’s 8 1/2, which
Sorrentino references in this work, may seem like grandly absurd satires, but
we know that they are also based on some truth about the way their gilded,
grand figures have actually lived their lives.
Filming centrally at Switzerland’s Hotel Schatzalp—the location also of
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—the
director calls up not only the glorious pre-war remnants of the belle epoque, but purposely references
the Roman spas of Fellini’s post-World War II work, in which the resort
visitors daily marched to the music of hot baths, mud-baths, and massages,
while nightly being wined, dined, and entertained by singers, clowns, choruses,
and magic acts. The general age of the decaying, overweight pilgrims is
ancient, and the place literally drips with incapacitation and ennui; the few
youthful denizens, Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea), Jimmy Tree (Paul
Dano), a Johnny Depp-like actor who has gained fame less for his well-acted
characterizations than for his role as a heavily costumed robot, and two
precocious children, a young film-loving girl and a violin-playing boy who,
obviously, have already been so pampered that in a few years it will be hard to
tell them from their elders.
Like Fellini’s script-stalled film
director played by Marcello Mastroianni, Youth’s
reportedly talented filmmaker, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), has brought his
whole writing staff with him to finish up the script of what he proclaims will
be his masterpiece. And, as he annually has throughout most of his life, he has
joined up with his good friend, the great composer Fred Ballinger (Michael
Caine), who has returned to the hotel to cleanse himself and get an annual
checkup.
Ballinger’s
personal secretary-daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz) is married to Boyle’s son
Julian (Ed Stoppard), who early on in the film, breaks up with Lena in order to
run off with the real-life pop singer, Paloma Faith, who, although lacking any
of Lena’s dark beauty is, he informs us, “great in bed.”
If Boyle is still
determined to work, even as it becomes apparent that his masterpiece is an
empty-headed piece of nonsense, Ballinger is insistent on gradually removing
himself from life. The film begins with a visit to him from Queen Elizabeth’s
envoys, requesting that he conduct a performance of his beloved “Simple Songs”
on the occasion of Prince Philip’s birthday.
For “personal reasons” Ballinger plays
Bartleby to their requests, repeating again and again that he “prefers not.” In
fact, Ballinger has truly become a kind of Bartleby, preferring not do much of
anything, including writing his memoirs—desperately wanted by a European
publisher—or, when Lena lashes out at him after she has been jilted, to face up
to his past, wherein, from his daughter’s viewpoint, he has basically abandoned
both mother and child for his career and other romantic infatuations with both
other women and men (reminding one a bit of composer-conductor Leonard
Bernstein’s life). He is “apathetic” as Lena describes him, which, we quickly
perceive, might describe nearly all those visiting this outrageously expensive
retreat, each of them, in one sense or another, running away or escaping from
the truths of their lives.
The problem is
that once Sorrentino establishes this he seems at a loss himself where to take
his own piece of cinema. It may be fascinating and even fun for a short while
to see these extravagantly blessed beings commiserating for their
down-on-their-luck feelings and stewing recriminations, but in a short while it
becomes absolutely maddening, as if we were watching a group of elderly
millionaires sitting in the corner to cry their eyes out. True, these highly
successful gripers do their gripping often with a high dose of wit; and we all
recognize that, in truth, they lived out their fabled existences not so very
differently from most of us, full of clumsy sloppiness. But daily interchanges
about how much they have been able to piss each morning quickly turns into what
might have been a quick-floating joke into a yawn-inducing arch of the eye-lid.
And no matter how Sorrentino attempts through Boyle’s daily maneuvers to
creatively spur on his team with group hugs and no matter how many compositions
Ballinger composes among the cows, the film can’t quite determine whether or
not it wants to be a satire or a sad meditation upon the arts and what it means
to grow older.
As it is, it
remains caught in between. And the sad comic duo at film’s center, in their
increasing listlessness and voyeurism, lose our interest. Despite the presence,
at moments, of the god-like totally undressed Miss Universe and the
inexplicable dressing up of the disaffected robot actor as Hitler—perhaps in an
attempt to try-out his next character in what will be a German-made movie—we
quickly begin to long to leave this moribund costume-drama behind.
Only when the
director calls out—a bit like a summoning of the Eumenides—a frightfully
made-up aged Jane Fonda as Boyle’s great actress-love Brenda Morel does the
film begin to wake up.
She has, as she
puts it, “trotted her ass from LA to Europe” in order to tell her former mentor
that he is a has-been director who she should no longer be allowed to make
another film, and that she has no intention of appearing in his great final
“testament.” Besides she’ll make more money playing in a Mexican soap opera,
enough to pay off her debts and buy a house in Miami. In an over-the-top,
bravura performance Fonda so clearly lays out the situation of both Boyle’s
personal
failures and
the problem with the film, that the director—after another unfruitful
conversation with Ballinger, wherein he explains why he cannot abandon his art
as his friend appears to have—Boyle suddenly jumps over the alpine-high balcony
to his death. For Boyle, it appears, emotion is everything!
In the meantime,
we have discerned that the reason why Ballinger will not perform his “Simple
Songs” (a momentous work composed just for this film by Pulitzer Prize-winning
American composer David Lang) is that he wrote it for and it was sung by only
his wife—a woman, now living in Venice, who, he explains, can no longer sing.
Finally released
from the retreat, Ballinger alone must face up to his own youth, to the past
that he has refused to embrace throughout the story. Returning to Venice, he
brings flowers to his incarcerated wife, who sits throughout his gentle
conversation—during which he calls up a deeply loving life between the two of
them, despite everything that his daughter might never have imagined—staring
out the window with open mouth, obviously suffering from severe Alzheimer’s or
dementia.
The sadness of
their life, as well as the beauty of it, is summed up, finally, in a
performance of his “Simple Songs,” in concert, after all, before the Queen and
Prince, sung by soprano Sumi Jo and violinist Viktoria Mullova with BBC Concert
Orchestra. The simple beauty of that music restores much of the energy
previously missing from this film, and stunningly explains its previous
lethargy. Yet Sorrentino’s determination to visually finalize some scenes back
at the retreat and depict the mid-air breakdown of Brenda Morel during the
performance sentimentalizes everything, while the “simple” presentation of
music surely might have been expression of the central character’s sorrow and
redemption enough.
Los Angeles,
December 16, 2015
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (December 2015).
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