
Christmas Eve, 1937, Piatra Neamt, Romania: Dominic Matei, a 70-year-old professor, contemplates suicide. The love of his life is dead, and he remains unable to complete his life's work on the origins of language. On April 24th 1938, Easter Sunday, he takes a train to Bucharest to kill himself, but suddenly he's struck by lightning. After a slow recovery, he miraculously grows younger and gains superhuman powers. WWII breaks out and Romania's fascist dictator Ion Antonescu co... (Full plot summary below)
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Christmas Eve, 1937, Piatra Neamt, Romania: Dominic Matei, a 70-year-old professor, contemplates suicide. The love of his life is dead, and he remains unable to complete his life's work on the origins of language. On April 24th 1938, Easter Sunday, he takes a train to Bucharest to kill himself, but suddenly he's struck by lightning. After a slow recovery, he miraculously grows younger and gains superhuman powers. WWII breaks out and Romania's fascist dictator Ion Antonescu cooperates with Adolf Hitler. Matei must escape to Switzerland, because Nazi scientists want to use his powers...Some years later, he meets a woman who has her own passage through a lightning storm. Not only does Dominic find love again, but her new abilities hold the key to his research...Coppola's adaptation of Mircea Eliade's surreal novella is a mysterious, romantic, melancholic and humorous journey to the outer limits of space, time and identity. Dreams become reality and reality feels like a dream...
Leave your thoughts about Youth Without Youth.
| Los Angeles CityBeatAndy Klein[It may be a ] kind of aesthetic mutant, but it's the sort of film whose weakest points only make it more interesting. |
| Film Freak CentralWalter ChawVery much a film of this era, its director returning after a ten-year absence from the cinema with a peculiar little masterpiece about things unrecoverable in time. |
| Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker... Coppola isn't as invested in the ideas as he is in their cinematic expression. |
| Urban CinefileAndrew L. UrbanA stilted and inelegant work, well below par for Francis Ford Coppola |
| eFilmCritic.comBrian OrndorfFrancis Ford Coppola is making movies again, and that's reason enough to rejoice. Even if it ends up a baffling intellectual riff, Youth Without Youth still resonates deeply in ways younger filmmakers would never even dare consider. |
| AV ClubScott TobiasIn the context of Coppola's life and career, the film has a searching intelligence and ambition that can't be entirely dismissed; with his own money and nobody looking over his shoulder, Coppola has gone uprriver again in an effort to reinvent himself and cinema in the process. He ultimately fails, but he can't be faulted for trying. |
| Sky CinemaElliott NobleCoppola drags everyone on a humourless trudge through a jungle of pretension that will have most moviegoers glazing over long before an ending that really isn't worth the wait. |
| Can MagazineFred TopelI could not even begin to tell you what Youth Without Youth is about. I know it's my job to, but I can't. It's one of those art films you have to watch sometimes and you can't believe somebody actually made it. |
| I.E. WeeklyAmy NicholsonThe suspicion that all this froth builds up towards nothing but some poetic imagery is inexorably realized and sours the magic of the second half of the film. |
| EmanuelLevy.ComEmanuel LevyBased on a philosophical text, this complex and convoluted meditation on time, memory and politics marks Coppola's comeback with an art film that in intent (if not execution) aspires to belong to the worlds of Resnais, Kieslowski and Tarkovsky. |