Paolo Sorrentino (2015)

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty was an evocation of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita.  Sorrentino’s follow-up is Youth, set in a hotel-cum-health-spa at the foot of the Swiss Alps.  Two of the guests there, and the two principal characters, are like a bifurcation of Guido Anselmi in Fellini’s 8½.  The British classical music composer Fred Ballinger, although retired, is still struggling to find refuge from his persisting celebrity.  The American film director Mick Boyle, Fred’s friend of many years, is working with a group of young acolytes on the screenplay for his new – and what Mick intends will be his last – movie.   Whereas Marcello in La dolce vita experiences ‘the good life’ in the present tense, the main character in The Great Beauty is mostly recalling it.  The Marcello Mastroianni protagonists in the two Fellini classics are, in spite of their anxieties and cynicism, in the prime of life, professionally and sexually.  Their counterparts in the Sorrentino movies are, in various ways, past it – this is much more emphatically the case in Youth than in The Great Beauty.  Although Sorrentino enjoyed commercial, critical and award-winning success with the latter film, its debt to Fellini, retrospective aspect and superficiality combined to turn it into an illustration of the decline of Italian cinema since its mid-twentieth-century heyday.  This too is much more emphatically the case with Youth.  It’s terrible.

Fred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel) discuss repeatedly how close they got to a woman they both fancied decades ago; and compare how much – that is, how little – each has managed to pee each day.  They bet on whether the middle-aged man and woman at a nearby table in the hotel restaurant will, as they usually do, remain completely silent throughout dinner:  Fred nearly always wins this bet but he has to pay up when he and Mick are out for a walk, see the man screwing the woman up against a tree, and hear the noises she’s making!  When another hotel guest, the current Miss Universe (Mădălina Diana Ghenea), descends, completely and splendidly naked, into the swimming pool where Fred and Mick are treading water, they gawp in wonder.   These two old men are also related by marriage:  Fred’s daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) and Mick’s son Julian (Ed Stoppard) are wife and husband, but not for long.  This is a marriage of directorial convenience:  its purpose is to end, to allow (a) Fred and Mick to be sad/angry, (b) Lena to have a mini-breakdown and be available for a new partner, (c) Julian to leave Lena for Paloma Faith ‘as Herself’ and Paolo Sorrentino to devise a nightmare for Lena based on the video for an actual Paloma Faith single (‘Can’t Rely on You’).  Youth is, when it chooses to be, a very cosy set-up.  But Fred and Mick are, of course, more than mischievous oldsters and (briefly) concerned soap-opera parents.  They’re Troubled Artists too.

In the first scene, Fred Ballinger is visited by a man from Buckingham Palace (hideously overplayed by Alex McQueen).  The Queen wants to offer Fred a knighthood and for him to come out of retirement to conduct his famous ‘Simple Songs’ at a special performance on the Duke of Edinburgh’s birthday.  Fred refuses.  Halfway through the film, the royal representative returns for a second attempt.  Fred refuses again but this time explains, his voice cracking with emotion, that he doesn’t want to be involved with a public performance of the ‘Simple Songs’ if his wife can’t do the singing of them, and she no longer can.   You don’t ask yourself why Fred didn’t make this clear to the Queen’s ‘emissary’ at the first time of asking, in the hope of sending him away for good.  You know the earlier reticence was simply to allow Paolo Sorrentino to spin things out – just as you know the film will end with Fred’s conducting the ‘Simple Songs’ in the presence of the Queen and Prince Philip.  (The songs are sung by the Korean soprano, Sumi Jo – also as Herself.  She makes an amazing noise but she’s too much in the close-ups Sorrentino gives her:  you start to sympathise with Fred for not liking the idea of Sumi Jo doing the songs, when the Palace man suggests her name.)  Youth is a very different Italian job for octogenarian Michael Caine, who does look and sound almost startlingly old here.  Caine acts with attractive simplicity and, for as much as the film allows it, dignity.  His received-pronunciation vowels come and go, though, and, as Youth drifts on, he evinces an air of not unreasonable boredom.

Fred Ballinger is much less of a problem, however, than Mick Boyle; and this isn’t only because Harvey Keitel is markedly less able than Michael Caine to substantiate the character or suggest any kind of intelligence behind his words and behaviour.  Fellini’s seemingly close identification with Guido Anselmi and Marcello Mastroianni’s great acting made you believe that the protagonist of 8½ was, among other things, a man with genuine creative talent.  There have been movies made by major directors that feature the making of a movie by what seems to be their alter ego yet the film-within-the-film is puzzlingly feeble. (Truffaut’s Day for Night and Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces are examples.)  Mick Boyle in Youth is something else.  Paolo Sorrentino may have meant him to be some kind of Hollywood archetype (though what kind?).  As Harvey Keitel plays him, Mick is no more than a stereotype – and of a hack director rather than the pretentious one who’s developing a screenplay fill of high-sounding ‘testament’ for a movie to be called ‘Life’s Last Day’.   Mick is full of insights that are as wrong as they’re banal.  He has one of his young co-writers look through the two ends of a telescope to illustrate that, ‘When you’re young, you see the future and it’s so close; when you’re old, you see the past and it’s so far away’.  He tells Fred that, ‘People are either beautiful or ugly – in between, there’s just cute’.  He then reminds his old friend that, ‘You say emotions are overrated but emotions are all we’ve got’.  Even Mick seems to think he’s gone too far with this last one.  He walks out onto a balcony, jumps off it and commits suicide.  It seems to be a combination of Mick’s leap into eternity and a doctor’s assurance that Fred is in rude health (even his prostate is OK) that gives him the courage to visit his silently demented wife (Sonia Gessner) in a Venice hospital, and finally to accept the Queen’s invitation.

Also staying at the hotel is Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), a young American film star who has ‘worked with all the great European and American directors’.  He therefore much resents always being associated with his role as ‘Mr Z’, a robot.  Jimmy – who seems meant to be somehow on the same wavelength as Fred Ballinger – is ‘preparing for a role’.  In spite of his precociously wide-ranging experience in cinema, Jimmy evidently hasn’t seen enough films like Youth.  A teenage hotel guest (Emilia Jones) tells him what her favourite among his characters is (and why); it isn’t Mr Z and Jimmy is astonished.  The joke is virtually repeated when Jimmy assumes Miss Universe will be an airhead and is amazed when she’s not.  The character that he’s preparing to play turns out to be Adolf Hitler.  Jimmy startles the other guests by putting on a wig and moustache and pounding his fist on the breakfast table but eventually says he’s going to pass on playing Hitler, having decided that he’d rather concentrate on the ‘desire’ in life rather than the ‘horror’.  Hitler might be thought to represent an extraordinary convergence of desire and horror and so an interesting challenge for an ambitious actor but perhaps Jimmy Tree is happier as a robot after all.  I’ve no idea whether Paolo Sorrentino has created this character with satirical intent and, if so, what satirical intent.

Mick Boyle wants an elderly American actress called Brenda Morel to play a key role in ‘Life’s Last Day’.  She visits the hotel to turn him down.  Dual Oscar-winner Brenda is played by dual Oscar-winner Jane Fonda, whose appearance in Youth Philip Kemp, in his Sight & Sound review, describes as ‘a selfless cameo as an over-the-hill Hollywood diva, caked in makeup like an aged Joan Crawford’.  Jane Fonda hasn’t a reputation for selflessness and I can’t see that she’s changed her tune here:  we know how good Fonda actually looks in her late seventies, compared with the raddled Brenda Morel.  Fonda does liven up proceedings, though.  She’s not only magnetic; she also leavens Brenda’s ball-breaking putdowns to Mick with an undertone of desperation.  She may well be advantaged by having so little screen time but, for the viewer, it’s time relatively well spent.  The worlds of religion and of sport are represented among the hotel residents by, respectively, a Buddhist monk (Dorji Wanchuk) and an alarmingly obese ex-footballer, named in the cast list as Diego Maradona (Roly Serrano).   The monk sits on a hillside all day preparing to levitate.  Fred, who jokes that this will never happen, eventually sees it happening.  Maradona can’t manage a width of the pool without needing artificial respiration and his grossly distended belly makes it hard for him to move at all.   But we then see evidence of his remarkable ball control skills still being intact.   These moments seem meant to indicate that, as Mick Boyle might say, people and life are always taking you by surprise.

The triumphs of the monk and the footballer also reflect a shift in Sorrentino’s tone, over the course of Youth, from self-satisfied misanthropy to muddled sentimentality.  Lena Ballinger, after being abandoned by her husband, delivers a tirade against her father (with whom she, oddly, shares a bedroom) for never-being-there-for-her when she was growing up.  Her life begins again when she’s approached one day by Luca Moroder (Robert Seethaler), a mountain-climbing instructor at the hotel.  This shy, mildly eccentric man is, perhaps, the only pleasant character in Youth with a speaking part.  (The monk has no lines.)   When Luca tells Lena that climbing mountains is great, she confesses to a fear of heights.  Positive-thinking Luca assures her that fear can be great too.  We eventually see the pair harnessed together, hanging off an alpine summit.  Luca tells Lena to trust that she’s safe with him and she does.  The implication is that Lena’s problems are solved, even though her earlier scenes suggested that fear of heights (aka fear of life) wasn’t her only hang-up.

The Great Beauty, as well as referring to something the protagonist sought and which eluded him, was a self-description of Paolo Sorrentino’s previous film – and the basis for the extravagant praise that it received.  Youth has been similarly admired.  There’s no argument about the ability of Sorrentino and his cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, to create remarkable pictures.  In this new movie, as in its predecessor, these include images both ravishing in their loveliness and compelling in their grotesqueness.  In the latter department, Diego Maradona’s gut is a standout in every respect but the theme of regret for youth and cafard in later life is the pretext for a continuing parade of exposed flesh, on bodies both enviably young and lamentably aged.  (The ripe nakedness in evidence tends to be female and the gone-to-seed version male.)  There are at least two significant differences between The Great Beauty and Youth, however.   First, some of the visuals here have a secondhand feel (which wasn’t the case with The Great Beauty, for all its derivativeness in other respects).  The camera sometimes drifts round the grounds of the hotel as if the time and place were last year and Marienbad.  And Mick Boyle is visited, shortly before he disappears over the balcony, by a vision of all the actresses he remembers from his moviemaking career – they materialise, one by one, in an alpine meadow.  This nods to the collection of women who, rather more continuously, visit Guido Anselmi’s imagination in 8½ (except that Mick sees, rather than the blend of quintessence and individuality that Guido’s women embody, a collection of Hollywood female types).  Second, The Great Beauty was watched by most English-speaking audiences under cover of Italian dialogue.  If you don’t understand the language in which the lines in a film are being spoken, it always affords the script a degree of protection: the subtitles may suggest the lines are naff but you can’t be sure the translation isn’t a travesty of the original.  There’s no hiding place for the writer-director of Youth.  The film is in often tin-eared English.

Sorrentino makes some good use of clichés of Switzerland.  One scene takes place in a store selling cuckoo clocks – the brightly-coloured display of clocks and the cacophony of cuckoo-chimes issuing from them are an amusingly bonkers combination.   In an earlier sequence, the cowbells of a beautiful dairy herd are more quietly delightful (although Fred Ballinger’s impromptu conducting of the cows and their bells is too staged).  But these amount to very minor consolations in a hollow film.  Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound review of Youth concludes as follows:

‘… when the style is as stylish as this … to reproach it for lacking substance seems like chiding champagne for being low on nourishment.’

Kemp ignores what follows the ampersand in the name of the magazine he’s writing for, and those cowbells are not enough.  It matters that the words accompanying the images in Youth – and the ideas behind both – are inane.  Paolo Sorrentino is serving champagne to wash down the tripe on his menu.

29 January 2016