December 18, 2007

Francis Coppola Makes A Come Back With The Film "Youth Without Youth"

After a 10-year break away from the film industry, Francis Coppola, the five-time Academy Award winner, film director, producer, and screenwriter returns to film-making with the film, Youth Without Youth following the accomplished movie The Rainmaker since 1997, based on John Grisham's 1995 novel, The Rainmaker.

The film, Youth Without Youth is an adaptation of a novella by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, which explores language, theology, the idea of the doppelgänger.

The central character is Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) a 70-year-old Romanian linguistics professor in pre-second world war Bucharest, who, in the midst of a possibly terminal depression, is struck by lightning and thus magically restored to the prime of life. Suddenly reinvigorated, Dominic can immerse himself again in his pet subject, the roots of language and religion, learning all the world's languages by a mysterious process of osmosis while conversing with his own alter ego and falling in love with two incarnations of the same mystically gifted woman.

It's bold and packed with ideas, but also fatally unformed, unconvincing and, on occasion, laughably pretentious - and too often you imagine that the central character will awaken to discover that it has all been a dream, and a pretty bad one at that.

But critics believe that the film might taste like fast food, suggesting that it might not contain the quality and style that characterizes Coppola's Oscar award-winning movies such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Coppola, 68, funded "Youth Without Youth" on his own, using profits from his lucrative Napa Valley wine business, and as a result he's dubbed it his independent film.

The film is being distributed through Sony Pictures Classics in the United States and now showing in theaters since December 14. It was released in France on November 14.

View Youth Without Youth Trailer here

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