Tuesday18 Dec 09:49 AM
Youth Without Youth
Does consciousness require language? What governs the cyclical nature of time and memory and consciousness? Does cinema mirror the memories in our life? Are there breaks in the continuity of time and space wherein consciousness might escape from the prisons of fascism, the body, or even love? And at what cost? To what end?
Do you enjoy exploring such tedious questions?
Your answer to this last question may serve as the best gauge for your enjoyment of Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years. Youth Without Youth is a lovely, lush, brooding meditation on the roots of language, empire, life and consciousness. Its tone and pacing is more reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman than, say, of The Godfather. It lavishly deploys a tasty, stylized --and, yes, long-winded and overdrawn-- use of 1940's romantic and surrealist film pastiches in its treatment of a nazi-era novella by Mircea Eliade, the renowned Romanian born scholar of religion and author of more than 1,000 works.
Eliade's doctoral dissertation was about yoga. He continued studying Sanskrit and philosophy in Calcutta, and authored dozens of landmark books on religious studies and yoga including Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Patanjali and Yoga, The Sacred and the Profane, The Forge and the Crucible, and Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
Sanskrit nuts should see the film, if only for the sement featuring the transmigrating "soul" of a Chandrakirti disciple. It's pretty far out. And the film is chock-full of similar themes and memes... How should we spend the time which sits before us? Must we wait for cataclysm, or is there another path?
Oh, yeah... The critics HATE it.
Trailers: link. The New York Times: review, slideshow, interview. Variety: link. Gazpachot: link.
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