Youth Without Youth

"I only ask you to think that my film was interesting." With these words, Francis Ford Coppola introduced Youth Without Youth at its premiere at the Rome Film Festival. Perhaps, Mr. Coppola's timidity is understandable -- after all, his first new film in ten years is a bizarre concoction.

Youth Without Youth tells the startling tale of an immortal linguistics professor on the run from the Nazis who loves a beautiful woman who falls into trances and speaks in ancient Babylonian -- and that's barely scratching the surface. Self-financed and shot on location in Eastern Europe with mostly local talent, the film is a tough sell, even from the director of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather.

Based on Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade’s novella, Youth Without Youth flits by like a strange dream. Eli Roth plays Dominic Matei, an obsessed scholar who is hit by a lightning bolt outside of the Bucharest train station and becomes young again. (Coppola has acknowledged the obvious autobiographical overtones.) In a hospital in German-occupied Romania, Matei's wondrous recovery and rejuvenation is overseen by Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz) and aided by the mysterious "woman in room 6" (Alexandra Pirici), who turns out to be a Nazi spy with swastika-embroidered lingerie.

Matei acquires a new set of teeth, speed-reading powers, and an argumentative doppelganger, and soon he is chased across Central Europe by Nazi scientists who consider him the most valuable specimen on Earth. When Matei encounters Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), a woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his first love, the journey takes them from Switzerland to India and Malta, where Laura regresses toward the origins of language.

The surreal slipstream undertow pull of Youth Without Youth is not unlike that of David Lynch's films -- if you replaced Lynch's brooding menace with Coppola's refined melancholy, flickering light bulbs with burning umbrellas, and Laura Dern's fisheye closeup with classically framed shots of Alexandra Maria Lara. Both directors have apparently abandoned big budget studio productions for much more personal films that, as Coppola said, hoped to "add new words to the vocabulary of cinema."

I will have to see Youth Without Youth a few more times before I can begin to decode how, exactly, the film blends playful mysticism, political allegory, pulpy adventure, high-minded artistic inquiry, fairy tales, and unabashed romance into a sweeping dream of considerable mystery and beauty -- but I'm looking forward to it.