Youth:
Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel contemplating life and death.
The basic ingredients for this film: take a retired conductor (Michael Caine) and an aging film director (Harvey Keitel), plant them in a luxury Swiss mountain spa, populate it with the oddest-looking people who can barely act, instruct your cinematographer to select as many eccentric compositions as possible and shoot it on the sharpest, clinical, high-definition digital so that every streak of pan stick makeup is emphasised, then top it off with a terrible script, delivered in the most emotionless, wooden way, especially by Caine, add to that an onslaught of relentless disco music fused with a syrupy sentimental score and you have Youth – an unbelievably pretentious elegy on the aging process juxtaposed with the longing gazes of Caine and Keitel at the nubile, youthful female flesh in the shape of Madalina Ghenea.
There is a lot of lingering on this piece of anatomy...
Madalina Ghenea who may be as fit as a fiddle, but her acting abilities leave a lot to be desired.
This pseudo-Antonioni-inspired film fails miserably and is an utter waste of the £12 million plus budget and the huge production crew involved. Three brilliant indie films could have been made with the money.
It is a classic example of the emperor’s new clothes that thinks its audience will be satisfied with the visual bravado evident in Paolo Sorrentino’s last film The Great Beauty. Sadly, a load of overly art-directed images strung together does not make a film. Script, script, script.
Madalina Ghenea.