Following up his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino returns this year with Youth, an ensemble drama that teams together Michael Caine, Rachel Weisz, Harvey Keitel and Paul Dano. After premiering at Cannes Film Festival, Fox Searchlight snapped up the rights and have now released the first U.S. trailer ahead of a stop at TIFF and a theatrical release in December.
We were quite mixed on it at Cannes, saying in our review, “Youth is narratively uneventful, striving to be a film of grand ideas. The main themes are no less than death and art, contemplated at length in conversations amongst characters staying at a swanky spa resort in the Alps. Primary amongst these are the exchanges between Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine), a retired composer and conductor, and his lifelong friend Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), a director in the midst of writing the script to a film he believes will be his triumphant swan song. Both are grappling with the implications of old age, in terms of their approaching death as well as their artistic legacy. All of the dialogue is so transparently subservient to the film’s thematic concerns, it’s very rare for any of it to feel authentic. It’s also overloaded with a grating self-referentiality that borders on the self-pitying, as these artists lament the hardships of the creative process and the pain of being misunderstood (or, rather, underappreciated).”
Check out the trailer below.
From Paolo Sorrentino, the director of Italy’s Oscar foreign language winner THE GREAT BEAUTY comes YOUTH, about two longtime friends vacationing in the Swiss Alps. Oscar winning actor Michael Caine plays Fred, an acclaimed composer and conductor, who brings along his daughter (Rachel Weisz) and best friend Mick (Harvey Keitel), a renowned filmmaker. While Mick scrambles to finish the screenplay for what he imagines will be his last important film, Fred has no intention of resuming his musical career. The two men reflect on their past, each finding that some of the most important experiences can come later in life.
Youth opens on December 4th.