Director: Paolo Sorrentino
The Oscar-winning Fellini knockoff The Great Beauty attracted some mainstream attention due to its sheer visual extravagance, but even supporters of the film didn’t make much of a case for the film’s thematic and philosophical content–it is a glossy spectacle, something to gape at. If Youth has some similarly striking images, it is dead on arrival due to its doubling down on cliche sentimentalities and an unmistakable air of self-importance. Every scene in the film is played as a climax–Sorrentino can go big, but in a film that deals in more minor keys than The Great Beauty, the form runs away from him in a series of increasingly over-directed, under-conceived sequences. The script often espouses that music is a universal language and carries a tremendous emotional content and, ironically, each musical cue rings with a tone of desperation–the swelling strings and impassioned pop music aspire to suggest a poignancy that feels almost eerily detached from what’s on screen. Michael Caine gets to look sad and preserves some dignity in doing so, but Harvey Keitel is saddled with awkward, on-the-nose dialogue. The fate of his character is so disaffecting that it is nearly comical. This is a mess in every way, which is a shame considering the occasional flirtation with interesting ideas (there’s a compelling running conversation about how little of their childhoods the men remember, and occasionally the dalliances with the surreal–as in an early dream sequence–are effective).
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
As if to imply that his predecessor wasn’t gaudy enough, Paolo Sorrentino takes Federico Fellini as a starting point and ups the ante in The Great Beauty. While La Dolce Vita portrayed a modern chic lifestyle as one that was full of surface pleasures but ultimately artificial, Sorrentino’s portrait of Rome is more jaded in that it doesn’t portray modernity in a particularly enticing way to begin with. Sorrentino is more intoxicated by ugly, distorted images that beautiful ones–see the extended takes on the death mask of a 104-year-old Mother Teresa stand-in. Furthermore, at every turn he suggests a certain fraudulence in not only the opulent lifestyle, but a hypocrisy in those that aspire to comment on it. In The Great Beauty, artists are frauds (it is unclear whether the film’s celebrity journalist (Toni Servillo) is immune to such a categorization) and narcissists. The film works as a sort of artsploitation picture–many of its pleasures existing at a sexual, surface level, to be gawked at but nothing more–but it’s philosophy is, if not empty-headed, tediously derivative.
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