tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11047330.post3705903364945101928..comments2023-10-24T21:04:32.920+03:00Comments on INTELect si ARTa: (si) despre eliade via coppolaperomanestehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18138498600151502565noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11047330.post-66241391405072777332007-12-29T06:57:00.000+02:002007-12-29T06:57:00.000+02:00Youth Without Youth(director: Francis Ford Coppola...Youth Without Youth<BR/>(director: Francis Ford Coppola; 2007)<BR/>by David Denby December 17, 2007<BR/><BR/><BR/>The worst thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s movie is that it isn’t outrageous enough to become camp. A seventy-year-old Romanian linguist and polymath, Dominic (Tim Roth), struck by lightning in 1938, undergoes some sort of regenerative process and recovers the body of his forty-year-old self. Years later, in the mountains, he runs into a pretty girl, Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), and damned if she doesn’t get struck by lightning, too, at which point she turns into his long-dead paramour, now suddenly granted access to languages and civilizations from eons ago. In the junk movies of the past, women inhabited by someone else’s soul spoke in tongues—maybe during sex—but when Laura bursts into Sumerian or Sanskrit, Coppola presents it as a revelation of the eternal return of civilization. The material is based on the work of the distinguished Romanian novelist and religious historian Mircea Eliade, but Eliade’s ideas may not be amenable to dramatic treatment, and, in this case, they have been handled with appalling solemnity. People sit around discussing time and language; professors with thick accents deliver opinions on arcane subjects; there’s a bald swami with a stick, a cave in India with skulls and parchment that turns to dust. Some of the images and period settings are lovely, but Coppola, once the greatest storyteller in movies, has settled for the kind of unworkably pompous nonsense that most people leave behind in a college bull session. With Bruno Ganz.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com