Critics reviews

It's shocking how unpersuasive this gadfly-ish auteur is when it comes to sketching characters in his peer group, and as in The Great Beauty he seems unsure of whether he's critiquing callow first-class largesse or luxuriating in it (the film is set at a deluxe alpine spa). Instead of fertilely mining the gap between artifice and authenticity, Youth simply tumbles in and disappears—and without a trace, at that.

Youth has been written off as pretentious self-indulgence, all style and precious little substance. But when the style is as stylish as this – much aided by Luca Bigazzi's glorious widescreen photography – to reproach it for lacking substance seems like chiding champagne for being low on nourishment.

None of [Sorrentino's] films has had me doubting his qualities quite like Youth—just as his last one, The Great Beauty, confirmed my certainty of his brilliance. Still, there are probably not that many filmmakers around today who can impress you with their inspiration and their vacuity, their sublimity and their crassness, from one film to the next—still less in the space of a single movie. This surely distinguishes Sorrentino as, at the very least, a fascinating anomaly.

To call this misty, low-risk collection of calculated revelations a high-toned The Bucket List would be a disservice to Rob Reiner. If it's true, as Sorrentino has Brenda say at one point, that artists don't get better with age, we are in for at least a rough couple of decades.

Youth asks interesting questions, and it's almost always stunning to look at and listen to. But it's lacking something. Call it forward momentum, maybe. Sorrentino's characters may be stuck, but his stories don't need to be. Characters this static and inward-looking sometimes need that extra push — narrative, emotional, whatever — to make sure symbolic tedium doesn't become actual tedium... Though often beautiful, this is an emotionally paralyzed film about emotionally paralyzed people.

Making his second film in English, following 2011's exceedingly eccentric This Must Be The Place, Sorrentino still mostly refuses to compromise. Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it's no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you're on Sorrentino's wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, "oppressive" might be a better word.

Too often Youth sympathizes with its characters' worst impulses. The most revealing scene of the movie may be when Mick arranges a meeting with his old muse, Brenda Forel (Jane Fonda), to pitch his movie, only for her to turn him down in favor of a TV role. The impact of this bombshell alters Youth‘s course, and it also permits Sorrentino to expand his list of soft targets to the hackneyed belief that television is the death of cinema.

The full-blown pathology that was already clearly indicated in The Great Beauty (2013) has developed, in Youth, into a metastasis. Critics of Sorrentino often point out the discrepancies between the strength of his visual flair and the weakness of his storytelling. But the screenwriting and cinematography of his films make perfect sense together, one pompously trying to disguise the shallowness of the other. This is, after all, the fraudulent essence of his cinema.

Sorrentino is a cinematic anti-Midas: everything he touches turns to shit. So it is in this film, in which virtually every decision in terms of framing, editing, sound design and narrative construction is inevitably, in some way, the _wrong_ decision, resulting in a cacophonic ode to aesthetic decrepitude.

I responded to the Maiwenn and Sorrentino films with neither love nor loathing, and indeed found myself generally absorbed and carried along by stray currents of genuine feeling in between all the emotionally incontinent moodswings of "Mon roi" and the visual/musical indulgences of "Youth.

All these layers of references and allusions ultimately feel like an empty shell game in a movie that is (like most of Sorrentino's work) only interested in the alternately grotesque and glittering surfaces of things, whether the screen-filling majesty of the Alps or the folds of sagging flesh of old age. Sorrentino is reaching for "Sunset Blvd." territory here, and he ends up with what feels like a late-career Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau pairing directed by a hack Fellini.

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel are both tremendous in their respective roles as revered maestros on the wane, while Sorrentino infuses the serenely beautiful (at times bewildering) imagery with life-affirming exuberance. A scene in which Caine conducts an orchestra of cows in a field is among the most joyous we've seen at this prestigious festival.