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Recently, I've been watching several movies featuring one of my favorite actors, namely Matthew Paige “Matt” Damon, who unfortunately here appears only for a very brief time in a single scene (but I didn't know, I didn't).
After ten years of cinematic inactivity, Francis Ford Coppola returns with “Youth Without Youth”, a rather visionary film, I would say, based on a novel by Mircea Eliade (a renowned historian of religions). At the time, the director was 68 springs old, roughly the same as the protagonist (expertly portrayed by Timothy Simon “Tim” Roth, skillfully made up as needed), a linguistics professor disillusioned with his life, having failed to finish a book on the research and origin of human language. For this reason, he intends to end his existence, but a lightning bolt strikes him during a storm, leaving him half-stunned on the ground. From that moment on, hospitalized in a hospital, he inexplicably begins to rejuvenate and is subjected to psycho/physical examinations by the eminent psychiatrist Dr. Stanculescu (played by the very talented Bruno Ganz), who manages to host him at his home to better observe the development of the patient who has also acquired superpowers (of which I won’t spoiler a jot).
The film was released in Italy on October 26, 2007. Its original duration was 210 minutes, later reduced to 170 and subsequently to 140 minutes. The excellent editor Walter Murch further cut it down to the desired 124 minutes.
Throughout its two-hour runtime, we are catapulted from Romania to Switzerland, ending first in India and then in Greece, and finally returning to Romania. Numerous themes are addressed, including metempsychosis, Buddhism, personality splitting, experiencing historical events of the future, and partly of the past, by the “struck” Prof. Dominic Matei. There's also a love story with a woman, who coincidentally, is struck by a lightning bolt that changes her life ça va sans dire... (and another very erotic story with a sexy spy in the pay of the Nazis), leaving us suspended in a dimension between dream and nightmare, while Nazism is rising in an Europe nearly unaware or willfully blind to events. The languages spoken in this film are: Babylonian
English
Sanskrit
German
French
Italian
Russian
Romanian
Mandarin
Latin
Armenian
Egyptian
and I think also Sumerian, plus one entirely invented by Dominic to keep his writings and his tape recordings secret.
The ending and some of the events I won't reveal even under torture, so that those who are interested remain rightfully intrigued and satisfied as soon as they set out to watch it, and that's it.
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