Youth

"The setting ofYouth, an ancient luxury sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, is almost reminiscent of a Wes Anderson film. And the personnel with whom Sorrentino populates it is just as illustrious: Michael Caine plays the famous retired classical music composer and conductor Fred Ballinger, Harvey Keitel his best friend Mick Boyle, a cultishly revered U.S. director who uses his vacation in the mountain hotel to prepare his last film with a handful of disciples. On walks, the two shrewd but exhausted old men talk about old loves and prostate problems and, in the course of a whimsically turbulent plot, penetrate further and further through the barriers of their vanities to their true feelings and former longings.Youthist a masterful, multifaceted, never moralizing or sentimental farce, which takes Michael Caine's sentence, uttered at the beginning with a British stiff upper lip, that feelings are sometimes overrated, to absurdity: They, not career, prestige and fame, are all we have left in old age. (...)Youth remains true to Sorrentino's favorite theme: the navel-gazing of famous personalities or bon vivants who question themselves, and thus the mechanisms of glamour and prestige."

Andreas Borcholte, Der Spiegel, 20.5.2015

Contributors and additional information:

Italy/France/GB/Switzerland 2015.
118 min. color. DCP. E/d/f
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Editing: Cristiano Travaglioli
Music: David Lang
Starring: Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Jane Fonda, Paul Dano


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.