Youth - The Greatest Beauty

Rating: 7/10 (15 June 2015)

Paolo Sorrentino's latest movie, the director's return to Cannes after the worldwide success gained with the Best Foreign Movie Oscar (yet the Croisette didn't particularly liked the film which later on won at the Academy Award), could and should be appreciated by the Neapolitan director-screenwriter's admirers, for his usual subtlety of camera work and the and memorable lines, as well as by his detractors, for the unexpectedly solid and consistent story development, something that in the past The Great Beauty's director has seldom achieved. And indeed there is much more beauty in Youth than in Sorrentino's former hit, exactly for the savvy mix of images and narration, for the excellent compactness of the cinematic language and writing, regrettably missing in the calligraphic series of beautiful images that made up The Great Beauty. In an exclusive and secluded thermal hotel on the Swiss Alps gather, like elephants at a savanna watering hole at dusk, guests of every age and origin, each looking for something different but all joined by the lack of this "something". With the calm and lightness of a glider, the movie flies over Fred, a retired great musician and conductor searching his human dimension in addition to his musical one, and Mick, a famous director searching a last movie which could amazingly seal a career that, however glittering, started to show the unmistakable signs of a slow decline. The movie takes the viewer, with crafty and touching empathy, to the final results of these searches, harmonic for Fred, dystonic for Mick. Captivating in the title choice, identifying youth with the inner search and growth rather than the body biological age, Youth is structured in dwindling layers, strongly integrated and unified: a protagonist (a self-controlled and convincing Michael Caine as Fred), a co-protagonist (the dependable Hervey Keitel as Mick), two secondary characters (an emotionally involved Rachel Wiesz as Fred's daughter and a cautious and endearing Paul Dano as the Californian star), circled by a chorus of characters painted with few yet definite strokes, reminding of the Commedia dell'Arte: the football legend beyond Sunset Boulevard, the masseuse of few words, the Alpine guide, Miss Universe, the Queen representative, the 100% made in Hollywood movie star (an ironic and charismatic yet ineffective Jane Fonda), the mixed group of your screenwriters, the silent couple.. The risky strategy of mixing faked reality (the Queen, the real pop start, the football star) to real narration proved to pay off: most probably Youth shall not gather the prizes and success of The Great Beauty but surely represents a clear leap forward towards Paolo Sorrentino's full maturity as a director and a screenwriter.