Pretentious Art Film

Rating: Null/10 (6 April 2016)

With all due respect to the brilliant actor Michael Caine, this film was awful!
High in the Swiss Alps, Caine plays a retired music conductor living out his final days as a morose and bitter old man. The film seeks to dramatize his awakening and his rediscovery of youth!
What a crashing bore!
Caine's character of Fred Ballinger has a daughter named Lena (Rachel Weisz), who serves as his publicist-manager. This character made no sense in the film because Fred had retired and he was fending off a British delegate from the Queen to return to England for to conduct a performance of his magnum opus of "Simple Songs." For the coherence of the screenplay, the daughter should have been negotiating with the delegate. Instead, she has no action or relevance to the film, other than to make the father even more callous and unsympathetic. The film included a set of cardboard characters whose dialogue sounded scripted.
There is also a parallel plot about a film director, as played by Harvey Keitel, who is in the process of conceiving a film that is to be his swan song. Of course, the subplot permits the filmmakers to explore the highbrow theme of "art representing life," and so on...ad nauseam. The lame attempts at humor with Caine and Keitel cracking jokes about their prostate problems were not funny and bogged the film down even more.
None of the characters were believable, and "Youth" appeared to be capitalizing on the success of "The Grand Budapest Hotel," a film with more humor and more imagination.