Youth

Watching Youth, the latest from Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino (whose 2013 The Great Beauty won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film), is more than a little like thumbing through the pages of a high-end lifestyle magazine, perhaps something with Aficionado in its name. It's very pleasant to look at all the pretty pictures and diverting to read the inevitably smug and self-aggrandizing prose aimed a yard or two above the heads of an aspirational audience, but once you put it down and go on with your life you never think of it again.

After all, you're not the sort of ascot dandy to whom the publication is addressed.

That's doesn't mean I didn't like Youth, on the contrary, I enjoyed hanging out with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in an Alpine spa that feels like a high-rent purgatory, a place where the aged well-heeled might wait around for whatever's coming next. For Fred Ballinger (Caine), a retired composer who has made a fetish of his grief, that's probably the grave. After all, he has just turned down an invitation from his Queen to perform at Prince Philip's birthday. There was only one singer for that particular song -- the one the prince loves so much -- and since she can no longer sing it, it will not be sung. Still, he's touched by the offer.

"I find monarchy so endearing ... so vulnerable," he tells the Queen's insistent emissary. "You eliminate one person, and all of a sudden the whole world changes. Like in a marriage."

On the other hand, Fred's friend, movie director Mick Boyle (Keitel), doesn't believe he's done yet. He's working on the script for the film that will provide the capstone for his career, abetted by a trio of millennial screenwriters who hang on his every word.

The two old dudes spend their days working and not working, talking about the old times and the women they may have slept with but can't quite remember. There's a certain charm in the interplay of these foxy old pros, though it's more in the side-eyes and cunning winks they trade than in the arch dialogue. These guys reflect and refract through myriad other characters, including a very convincing Rachel Weisz, who as Fred's daughter Lena delivers the film's most honest moment, and Jane Fonda, who in a brief appearance as Mick's old muse properly devastates the old fool's illusions. And then there's the weirdly touching image of the soccer genius Diego Maradona (Roly Serrano), helplessly obese, wandering around the grounds like some exotic pet, a benign white elephant touched with a perplexing grace.

Faring less well are Paul Dano as a negligible actor who -- like Fred -- wishes he were known more for his serious work than the playful role that somehow captured the audience's imagination, and pop star Paloma Faith, who unconvincingly plays a home-wrecking pop star named Paloma Faith.

Does it make sense? Well, maybe -- though it's hardly wise. You might get more intellectual sustenance from the Beatles' "When I'm 64."

On the other hand, Youth is beautiful to look at, thanks largely to the formal calculation of Sorrentino and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, and individual scenes are interesting enough. There's a lovely sequence when Fred manifests his musicality by conducting a pasture, and a tender moment when he improves a young violinist's technique by skewing it toward unorthodoxy.

Yet through it all, you get the sense that the film is not for you, that it's aimed at some elevated demographic. It's not a film for cineplexes or even grungy art-houses, but for the marble-pillared home theaters of tasteful billionaires.

MovieStyle on 01/22/2016