* * ½ stars | Drama | R | 118 minutes
If I had never seen director Paolo Sorrentino’s “This Must Be the Place” (2011) or his Academy Award-winning “The Great Beauty” (2013), and if my first introduction to the Italian filmmaker had been his new film “Youth,” I honestly believe that I might be swooning over it. As it is, I found the lushly bizarre, lightly poetic movie so lazily derivative of the surreal style of those earlier works that I’ve started to question my earlier four-star review of “This Must Be the Place.”
Or could I have lost my appetite for Sorrentino, whose works are known for being both strange and strangely beautiful?
Set in a resort in the Swiss Alps — where two old friends (Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel) are staying amid a clientele of oddballs that includes a Johnny Depp-like movie star researching the role of Hitler (Paul Dano), a levitating Buddhist monk (Dorji Wangchuk) and a jaw-droppingly naked Miss Universe (Madalina Ghenea) — “Youth” certainly qualifies as both strange and beautiful.
Caine, playing retired composer Fred Ballinger, and Keitel, as filmmaker Mick Boyle, sit at the center of a world as cloistered and exotic as a greenhouse full of human orchids. Riding the elevator to their rooms or sitting on the manicured lawn, Fred and Mick encounter hotel guests who seem to coexist only in Sorrentino’s imagination: a mysterious woman in a hijab; a morbidly obese South American tourist with a preternatural gift for keeping a tennis ball aloft with his foot, like a Hacky Sack; a wealthy elderly couple who never speak.
The movie is gorgeously filmed, with nearly every scene a dreamscape. And while that’s great, the story suffers from the same problem as the script for which Mick and his stable of young screenwriters are struggling to write a final scene: It’s a collection of vignettes straining to coalesce into a satisfactory resolution. Indeed, as “Youth” wears on, it seems there is no possibility of one.
The engine that drives the narrative, if that’s even the right word, is the effort of the British queen’s emissary (Alex Macqueen) to lure Fred out of retirement to conduct one of his famous musical works at a command performance. Music always features prominently in Sorrentino’s work and is here provided by singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters, the Manchester quintet the Retrosettes and various classical composers, as well as the kooky British pop singer Paloma Faith.
Faith, inadvisably, also portrays the mistress of Mick’s son (Ed Stoppard, son of playwright Tom Stoppard), who has left his wife (Rachel Weisz), who also happens to be Fred’s daughter. Old family history gets dredged up, including an out-of-left-field revelation about Fred’s sexual orientation.
None of this really matters. Plot rarely does in a Sorrentino film, which tends to be about the human comedy-tragedy that is life, expressed visually rather than through prosaic exposition.
“Youth” is presumably about aging, although it’s hard to tell. It could also be about creativity, lust, memory or any number of other themes that Sorrentino picks up and discards, like curios in a cinematic Cabinet of Wonder.
“Youth” is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age. I’m not sure the buzz of watching it is worth the headache the morning after.
