Youth

Another visual delight from Paolo Sorrentino (La Grande Belleza), Youth is really about death and decay and the span of lifetimes. Anchored by a magnificent performance by Michael Caine, it takes place in a luxurious but decrepit spa in the Swiss Alps, where rich and famous people go to take the waters and rejuvenate. As in La Grande Belleza, Sorrentino imagines the enclave where the wealthy congregate as the slightly Dantesque anteroom of Hell. It is supposed to be the lap of luxury, but it is also decadent and tacky, in a vulgar bubble of its own, bereft of the outside world.
The movie, a richly symbolic and sometimes shambolic disquisition on aging, is a visual feast.
This is not only because of Luca Bigazzi's extraordinary cinematography but because Sorrentino, like a proud and prolific chef, serves frame after frame of crisp, powerful images. He is very good at visual storytelling and he delivers many wonderful visual puns: an embarrassment of riches. The editing is a wonder. While the dialogue is clunky and uneven at times, and the philosophical ramblings not always clear, the images are exuberantly expressive. They communicate better than all the words in the story.
Sorrentino has the gall, and the talent, to follow in the footsteps of Fellini, using the same kind of grandly symbolic imagery that skirts the province of dreams and the subconscious. Youth is reminiscent of 81/2, which is also about the mind and soul of a creative man. Sorrentino seems to be deliberately courting the comparisons to Fellini, while at the same time dutifully following his tradition. He gets away with it because, like his master before him, he has a wry sense of humor, and a very playful, satirical sensibility. He may be philosophical, but he is not pretentious. Who else but Sorrentino could summon an aged, wheezing, obese version of Maradona as the perfect embodiment of wasted, incomprehensible genius?
Michael Caine plays Fred Ballinger, a famous composer who is retired and "apathetic". An emissary from the Queen of England requests that he come out of his shell to conduct his famous "Simple Songs" for Prince Phillip's birthday. He refuses. He is done with music and, apparently, with life. His best friend and in-law, film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) is at the spa too, writing his last screenplay, as is Ballinger's daughter and assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz) and a pensive Hollywood actor (an excellent Paul Dano). Lesser actors would have trouble sounding halfway credible in such a grandiose movie of ideas, but this bunch holds its own. When sharing the screen with Michael Caine, they rise to the occasion. Otherwise, they would all be toast.
Ballinger is supposed to be unsentimental, a man who forsook his family for his music and is now nursing his regrets with dignified aloofness, if not a deep funk. It is a casting coup, since Caine is anything but cold, and he imbues this man with a serene world-weariness that is deeply alive and very touching.
Keitel and Caine compare prostate problems as they ogle a Miss Universe who is not as dumb as everyone thinks, and try to come to terms with aging. They obsess about a woman they once loved, and while Ballinger is trying to renounce this world, Boyle is consumed with leaving a masterpiece for posterity. Youth is about the finality of life, the ravages of time and the more pernicious ones of ego. The two friends are at the end of life, but Fred's daughter, Lena, provides a glimpse into what happens in the middle. Youth is a movie about the many faces of experience. It is populated with wise children, cheeky old people and every age in between.
Ballinger's music is composed by David Lang, the contemporary American composer from Bang on a Can. Sorrentino is as good with images as he is with the use of sound and music, and Lang's score ties majestically (if in places just a little bit schmaltzily) with the visuals. Youth is made with extraordinary craftsmanship. But it is a throwback to the filmmaking style of cinematic symbolists of yore, like Fellini and Ken Russell. I detect a hint of quaint machismo, too. Even though it looks supremely modern, it seems a bit old-fashioned.
Youth is too long and meanders in places, but if you allow yourself to be swallowed by the ravishing beauty of its every frame, you are in for an experience. They just don't make this kind of movies anymore.

The Great Beauty

A cinematic tour de force, this meandering tone poem to Rome and Italy by Paolo Sorrentino, like his movie Il Divo, resists categorization. Very reminiscent of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, it centers in the character of Jep Gambardella, played by Sorrentino's frequent collaborator, the great Toni Servilio. Jep is a jaded, cynical, well to do journalist, and elegant dresser (he wears the most astonishing bespoke clothes) who lives it up until late every night and gives us a tour of the haute demimonde of present Rome.
The movie starts at dawn, with a flock of nuns among the crumbling ruins. A Japanese tourist suffers cardiac arrest, while an angelical choir sings in a bell tower. Then Sorrentino cuts to an astonishing sequence at a party which has such verve, energy and authenticity, it sucks you in completely. This is one sweaty, vulgar, ostentatious affair, decadent as all Roman parties seem to be in Italian movies. It is here that Jep makes his first appearance. It's his 65th birthday, and there he is, surrounded by crumbling aristocrats, newfangled social climbers, media clowns, etc. Like a vampire, he lives by night, and though he is alive with curiosity, he seems permanently exhausted and disenchanted with L'Italia.
There is a plot in this movie, and a lot of humor, but Sorrentino's style is closer to that of a lush, well-funded music video. That he managed to deconstruct the political life of Giulio Andreotti in the excellent Il Divo with this kinetic style is a testament to his chutzpah and his enormous talent. He is a startlingly original filmmaker; a Terrence Malick on steroids.
Sorrentino takes his sweet time introducing us to Jep's laid back lifestyle in a series of breathtaking set pieces, enhanced by an equally breathtaking soundtrack that  brilliantly combines the tackiest party music (stuff that only Eurotrash could love), with choral music and a lovely score. The sound design and the editing are masterful. So don't be fooled by the apparent looseness of the story. Sorrentino is a gifted artist. Even though he resists the encumbrances of mechanical plot points and tight structures, the movie is coherently mapped out. It's a magnificent ride into the dilapidated heart of Rome.
At some point, Jep takes a prostitute (the daughter of an old friend, as it turns out) on a private tour of the most secluded Roman palazzos, and in a cavernous one, they wander into a bunch of old principessas playing cards. It was in that sequence full of Roman busts and centuries old art collecting dust, that I was struck by the realization that Rome was born decadent. It is as decadent now as it was during Mussolini, the 19th century and all the way back to Nero and Caligula. It is the city with the longest decline in history.
Sorrentino takes fun stabs against a sybarite Cardinal from the Vatican who loves talking about food but has no patience for heartfelt personal confessions, and teases us with the appearance of a purported ancient saint bound by a vow of poverty, who stays at the tony Hassler hotel and complains of discomfort, since she is used to sleeping on the floor. There are also crooked entrepreneurs, aristocrats you can rent for the night, and wealthy, smug communist party members. Sorrentino's witty, at turns loving and exasperated ode to Rome does not go down expected paths, and always comes up with surprises. It seems that nothing in Rome is what it seems.
The saint turns out to be legit, even though she has a creepy minder that behaves more like a rock star business manager. In his many wanderings, Jep visits a Dantesque plastic surgeon's office where people go to get Botox injections as if they were eating the host at communion. The holy surgeon happens to also give spiritual advice; even nuns come to see him.
The Great Beauty is a film about an aging city, an aging Roman and a crumbling society but it is full of life and love for Rome and the crazy mess that is Italy.  It is an experience to behold, hence it is worth watching it on a big screen with a great sound system. Let The Great Beauty wash over you in all its vulgar, lively, amusing, enervating, tragic, decadent glory.

This Must Be The Place

An interesting train wreck of a movie by Paolo Sorrentino, the film stars Sean Penn as Cheyenne, a washed out emo rocker who lives in a sad, grand mansion in Ireland (to avoid taxes) and is bored out of his meager wits, which seem to have been extinguished by a life of drug use. The main problem with the movie is Penn's performance, which as committed as it is, and not without flashes of humor and slyness, is too exaggerated to be believable. Penn makes Cheyenne a soft spoken mess, a too delicate spirit still wearing makeup and hideous eighties hair long past his expiration date, but he turns out to be wily once he finds a purpose in life. Cheyenne is depressed because his morose songs made a young fan commit suicide. His wife, the fantastic Frances McDormand, (despite her spirited performance, it's impossible to understand what she sees in him), tells him he needs to find something to do with his life. He decides to go to America to see his father, whom he hasn't talked to in thirty years. The father turns out to be an orthodox Jew and Holocaust survivor. Cheyenne learns that the Nazi who tortured him is still around, and goes on a quest to find him. His wispy façade conceals a man with a healthy force of will: the pathetic ex-rocker becomes a pretty effective Nazi headhunter. The movie is a moral fable about guilt and consequences, about children and parents, about people holding dark secrets that spread misery around like an invisible force field. What makes it fascinating is the contrast between its haunting sadness and Sorrentino's trademark crisp, hyperrealistic visual style (Luca Bigazzi is the cinematographer). The movie doesn't quite work, but you can't avert your eyes. Cheyenne goes from New York, where he confides in his friend David Byrne, playing himself, to the Southwest, to the Midwest, and I was bracing for the usual European filmmaker oversimplifying of America and its Marlboro country vistas, but Sorrentino is smarter than that. He doesn't caricature America or its people, he trains his stylish eye on its endless landscapes. The movie looks gorgeous.
Cheyenne's search leads him to the Nazi's granddaughter (a great Kerry Condon) and her chubby misfit of a son, and the three develop a tender friendship. This is the best part of the movie, the most quietly moving. The rest is tonally jarring, deeply unbalanced by a central performance that doesn't quite jell and a strained ending. But the music by David Byrne and Will Oldham is lovely and if you decide to go on the quirky ride, This Must Be The Place has, at moments, a certain amount of grace.