SummaryFred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel), two old friends, are on vacation in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for ...
SummaryFred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel), two old friends, are on vacation in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for ...
Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel do some of the best work of their careers playing longtime friends navigating their twilight years in Paolo Sorrentino’s witty, wise and swooningly beautiful dramatic comedy Youth.
Simply a fantastic movie that reminds us that everyone has a future and that we should find or rekindle passion in life. An amazing cast and many surreal moments.
Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it’s no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you’re on Sorrentino’s wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, “oppressive” might be a better word.
Visually, it’s never less than arresting. Gently amusing, too, is the relationship between Keitel and Caine, even if the dialogue Sorrentino writes for them often displays a fondness for empty epigrams.
The problem with Youth is not that it’s empty — the accusation Kael and others lodged against Mr. Sorrentino’s precursors — but that it’s small. Its imagination feels shrunken and secondhand, in spite of the gorgeous vistas and beautiful naked women. Or actually, because of them.
A sweet film with captivating and wonderful perfomaces from a magnificent cast.
michael Caine deserves all his praises for the best best role in the last years of his amazing carreer, but also the rest of the cast (Weisz over everybody) are great.
Sorrentino together Bigazzy give us their usual beautiful shots, for a little, beautiful movie, less ambitious respect the great beauty but hower vibrant and heartfelt.
All dressed up and nowhere to go. Paolo Sorrentino's previous film The Great Beauty was among my favourites of 2013. Youth has much of its style, but none of its substance. It certainly looked gorgeous, but left me feeling empty and unfulfilled.
The film talks a lot about emotions but it never creates them, just endlessly philosophises about them. Its characters remain not so subtle metaphors, but never real people.
There's nothing particularly wrong about Youth and at times it is quite enjoyable, its sin is in not achieving greatness which for a drama of this type is an absolute failure. It wants to be a grand statement about life but has nothing meaningful to say. It is still very watchable, specially if you like films of this type. Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel are what makes it so with their fun portrayal of old friends. Beyond that there's not much else that has stuck to my mind about the film. Overall Youth is not a bad film, but there's nothing recommendable about it.
While The Great Beauty had a great deal of charm, fuelled by visuals and philosophical talk, Youth starts on the same premise but ends up in a different direction: that of empty vanity. Sure, visuals are still good, but they lack the mysticism of its predecessor, and the depth.
One is left wondering (without much urge to do so, though) what exactly is the purpose of this: multiple secondary characters don't come to a resolution, and we don't get why they were featured so prominently, then. Moreover, the philosophical level of the questions raised is common knowledge, something anybody could see and understand.
All in all, Youth comes off as pretentious and pointless; one could say, it's a visual exercise - but in the history of cinema visual exercises have been a-plenty, and much more focused.
We were attracted to this film by the marvelous cast and the generally positive reviews. What a disappointment! Pretentious does not begin to describe this film. The plot, what there is of it, is needle thin, and wanders all over the lot, introduces characters with no explanation of how they support the story. Then as if the story were insufficiently strange, the director introduces fantasy episodes, such as levitation and cows singing. If we weren't with other people, we would have walked out after a half hour. Or to put it another way, if we got it through Netflix, it would not have lasted 15 minutes.
My immediate reaction while watching “Youth” and when the end credits came on was that this was a load of pretentious ‘artistic garbage' but I thought a stronger word! There is so much excess in this film ranging from annoying music tracks, songs that don’t make sense, fantasy images supposedly being taken for real, people that are in another movie just as scenes are thrown in to show the director’s, and film editor’s, expertise but not necessarily for a movie called “Youth”.
Performances by Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Paul Dano and Rachel Weisz are defeated by the script and what they have to say. Younger actors, except for Weisz, are secondary to the plot and are arranged in so many trick shots, as many of the extras are, that the camera, not the actors or screenplay, are the major attraction. Jane Fonda, grotesquely made up, plays a veteran actress who shows that she will do almost anything in a film even if it means being foul mouthed.
Old people are treated like robots and/or sheep with all treated alike and not able to think for themselves. It all takes place in a spa where people are continuously given massages or spread out in pools or steam rooms. The positive aspects of the movie, where the spa is located, are beautiful scenes of the Swiss alps..
Both Caine and Fonda are being mentioned for possible Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting actress for her few moments on screen. I am big fans of both but I don’t see that happening for either unless watching him conduct a herd of cows which has no humor or seemingly any purpose as we already know he is a conductor/composer of some fame.
“Youth” is for someone who believes that a man can levitate, which happens, and may be what the movie is about.
Production Company
Indigo Film,
Barbary Films,
Pathé,
France 2 Cinéma,
Number 9 Films,
C-Films AG,
Medusa Film,
Film4,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
France Télévisions,
RSI-Radiotelevisione Svizzera,
SRG - SSR,
Téléclub,
Mediaset Premium,
Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo (MiBACT),
Regione del Veneto,
Regione Lazio,
Bundesamt für Kultur (BAK),
Eurimages,
Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC)