Review: Youth

Youth (15)

Italy/France/Switzerland/UK 2015  124 mins  Dir: Paolo Sorrentino  Starring: Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, Jane Fonda, Paloma Faith, Alex Mcqueen

Just as an expert money launderer can transform a huge pile of filthy lucre into squeaky-clean cash, so a skilled European film director can bring arthouse respectability to a rather sentimental tale of two lecherous old geezers with the judicious addition of a few dollops of magic realism and a handful of cheesy aphorisms. This second English language film by Paolo Sorrentino, lauded Italian director of The Great Beauty, casts Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as a pair of self-pitying crumblies getting all wistful about their lost youth as they vacation together at an exclusive spa resort in the Swiss Alps. Watching the scene in which they leer at a naked Miss Universe as she shares their swimming pool, one can’t help but think that if Harvey’s pal Bob De Niro’s Dirty Grandpa had been directed by a feted auteur the critics would be swooning over it rather than wielding the hatchet.

Fred Ballinger (Caine) is a retired British composer who spends much of his time fending off a rather unctuous emissary of the Queen. The flunkey’s mission is to persuade Ballinger to return to Blighty to conduct a performance of his Simple Songs for Her Maj. He declines repeatedly, citing ‘personal reasons’, and prefers to while away his days over-sharing his bladder status and lamenting missed legover opportunities with septuagenarian American film director Mick Boyle (Keitel). Surrounded by a bunch of earnest, beardy acolytes, blocked Boyle is struggling to find an ending to what he describes, rather grandly, as his ‘testament’. A wedge is driven between the self-pitying codger buddies when Boyle’s son dumps Ballinger’s perpetually resentful daughter Lena (Weisz) in favour of pop singer Paloma Faith (who appears in an annoying, mercifully brief cameo), confiding in Ballinger, rather ungallantly, that Ms. Faith is better in bed than his daughter. Cue: much wailing self-pity on Lena’s part. But the self-pity doesn’t end there. Also staying at the hotel is watchful, jaded young Hollywood star Jimmy Tree (Dano), who laments that even though he’s a Proper Serious Actor the public only know him as a robot in a crappy sci-fi flick.

Sorrentino certainly puts some arresting images on screen, from Ballinger ‘conducting’ a hillside of cows to Boyle facing a field of leading ladies and Tree dressing up as Hitler for dinner. Jane Fonda pitches up as Boyle’s aging, furious, alarmingly botoxed dragon of a muse to deliver a searing monologue that threatens to unbalance the film. And an exceedingly fat fella who’s apparently intended to be Diego Maradona is trailed by a woman with an oxygen tank. But there’s rather less going on here than meets the eye, with often rather stilted dialogue, an autopilot performance from Caine, and a shallow, emotionally manipulative storyline underneath the studied arthouse oddness that winds up exactly where a Hollywood tearjerker might be expected to take us. And if there really is an Alpine resort catering to a clientele of leathery oldsters and sexy young ladies with a penchant for walking around naked, you’d expect the queue to stretch halfway down the mountain.