Francis Ford Coppola’s lovely intellectual comic book fantasy, Youth without Youth, is presented as a captivating DVD release by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. To begin with, the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is fantastic. Its hyper-dimensionality and directional effects significantly enhance a viewer’s involvement with the film’s atmosphere and environment. The sound is then supported by Mihai Malaimare, Jr.’s luscious cinematography, which is effectively transferred in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 payback. Coppola has made a couple of pedestrian films during the course of his career, but the picture and sound onYouth without Youth are just too tantalizing to fail the narrative. Tim Roth portrays an elderly college professor who is made immortal, and younger, when he is struck by lightening. He obtains other powers as well, which he uses to his advantage, until he meets a woman who has also been zapped. Set in Europe and elsewhere around the world, the film begins in the late Thirties and advances several decades over the course of its 125 minutes (the film’s end credits, running 4 minutes, are offered as a separate menu selection), contemplating reincarnation, schizophrenia and many other human contradictions. From the upside-down camera angles and leisurely pace to the abstract premise and episodic plot, it is understandable that the film did not seize the imaginations of moviegoers the way in which Coppola’s more popular films have, but if you just accept the story on its own terms, its exploration becomes one of those journeys where the destination is much less important than the exquisite luxury of the ride.

There is an alternate French track in 5.1 Dolby and optional English and French subtitles. A passable 9-minute production featurette is accompanied by a more comprehensive 18-minute piece about the movie’s makeup effects and an insightful 27-minute segment about the music (sound designer Walter Murch: “Music is most valuable when it tells the audience how to channel an emotion that the film has already evoked, which is different than the other way of working where you use the music to evoke the emotion itself. And music is very good at that. It’s like a drug, like injecting steroids into a muscle. It can do it. If you put on an emotional piece of music and put it up with the film, it will make people feel emotion, but it creates a dependency on the music to create an emotion, so they’re waiting for the music to tell them what emotion to feel. Whereas what’s much better is if the film, which is to say the story and the characters and the ambience and the photography and the everything, creates an emotion, and then, at the right moment, the music comes in and says, ‘Here’s how to channel that emotion. This is what pocket to put that emotion in.'”).

Coppola provides a rewarding commentary (supported by its own optional subtitling) for the film, explaining his approaches to the story and what the story means to him, going over the history of the production and his experiences shooting in Romania, dissecting his own filmmaking choices, and sharing his directing strategies. “There are a number of dreams in the movie. Because I had underlined in the story, all the dreams with a kind of purple pen, I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how I’ll show it’s a dream. I’ll tint it purple or make it wavy and weird as dreams are.’ And then I thought to myself, ‘You know, dreams aren’t purple, and they’re not wavy and weird. Dreams are very realistic. In fact, at the time you’re having the dream you think you’re in reality and it’s only later, when you look at the context of the dream, you find it strange.’ And so I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna just do the dreams as upside-down images because that way, they can be totally realistic except that you notice something is fundamentally different, which is that they’re upside down.'”

June 25, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•