One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Youth Without Youth is showing on MUBI in the UK through June 13, 2021 as part of the series Reignite Cinema: Francis Ford Coppola's Outliers.
2007's Youth Without Youth—Francis Ford Coppola’s puzzling, Ruiz-like return to filmmaking, adapted from the Romanian novella of the same name—channels a kind of cinematic dementia, the state of cognitive decline referenced in the title of one of Coppola’s very first films. Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is an elderly linguist driven by one singular pursuit, uncovering the genesis of language, so deep in his niche that he’s never finished a single book. A once-in-a-lifetime lightning strike turns Matei into a young man once again, now endowed with physical and intellectual superpowers that send him even further into his pursuit of knowledge. An international co-production with eleven spoken languages, Youth Without Youth exists beyond the confines of genre, industry, and even time itself. In the dimming light of the film’s final moments, as Matei drifts out of consciousness in the cold snow, a digitally-constructed rose appears in his hand, almost like something out of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames: a plastic image that will live on after his mortal form fades away. Matei’s second chance at life is a haze of potent affect and experiences, as he slips from youth to old age in even less than the blink of an eye, unbound by temporality. These are the final flashes of a dying man grasping at his memories, viewing them as movies in his mind. Coppola is particularly concerned with the passage of time, mortality, and our futile attempts as humans at recapturing the memories that have long slipped through our fingers. The flashbacks in The Godfather Part II (1974) feel less like historical re-enactment and more like Michael’s sepia-tinted imaginations of his father’s early life; The Rain People (1969) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) are both about women trying to relive their lives, one figuratively and one quite literally. Twixt (2011) cathartically remakes and processes the sudden death of Coppola’s son Gian-Carlo in 1986, which has haunted his movies ever since. Cinema is the contradiction expressed by the title of Youth Without Youth: its subjects are physically young forever, but can still feel distant and unknown. A film can be lived and experienced time and again, but it also stands in place, like fossils trapped in the amber of celluloid or an artificial rose in a cold, dead hand.