Abstract and dreamlike

Rating: 7/10 (3 December 2015)

Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has crafted an art house film full of metaphor and overwhelming symbolism. Thank goodness that the two leads give Youth the gravitas it needs to make it's moral impressions.
Fred (Michael Caine) is a famous retired composer who is on vacation at a fancy resort in the Swiss Alps with his best friend Mick (Harvey Keitel). Mick is a film director who is there with a team of young screenwriters while writing his next masterpiece. When Fred is asked to come out of retirement to conduct his music for the Queen of England on her son's birthday, he and Mick begin to contemplate their age, legacies, and the passage of life around them.
The film is written and directed by Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) and his touch is an eccentric one, as he weaves his way through the resort and spotlights small moments by the other guests and the staff, giving a sort of outlandish Upstairs/Downstairs feeling to the movie. The guests are all rich and famous in some way (a decadently dressed couple who never speaks, a retired and extremely overweight athlete, Miss Universe, a levitating monk, etc). The staff is made up of very young and bored looking people catering to their wealthy guests in grey polos. Sorrentino is not a very traditional storyteller, and the way he jumps from one subject to another can make you forget certain plot points; by the time you get back to the main characters you might have to scramble to remember what happened with them last.
When Mick does something out of the blue and extremely out of character, Fred and everyone at the resort is thrown for an emotional loop. Fred's daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz), asks him what they would talk about as friends- did he see this coming at all? Fred says they only talked about the good things, never the bad things. Begging the question, do you really know someone if you only see the lighter side of them? Is it in the darkness of our friends and loved ones that we truly get to know them?
Keitel and Caine have wonderful chemistry as two friends who have grown in fame and fortune together. They talk about being old, about how they were when they were young, and how the youth don't know how great they have it. The film is filled with reflection of once upon a time greatness. Mick believes he still has great movies to make while Fred is done with music and wishes to live his last days out in peace. One man refusing to accept his prime may have passed and another who is happy to let it go. Their light and humorous talks ground an otherwise detached and bizarrely structured film. Abstract and dreamlike, Youth is a study in age, wealth, fame, and best friendship.