I think most critics have simply rejected Youth Without Youth as a film that was too ambitious to support its own ideas. But I wonder if the opposite is actually true. The film is entranced by these ideas about language, memory, and history connected to the well known philosophy of myth developed by Mircea Eliade, who wrote the story on which the film is based. I think the flaw of the film is that Coppola hedged his bets by trying to make the film more watchable as a story rather than letting it tread its own course through the implicit mystery of the storyline. I can easily see this film having achieved the spirituality of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, a film with which it has some narrative and thematic affinities. But whereas Tarkovsky’s film gives itself over to the abstract rhythms of remembered history, Coppola’s tries to make a story out of themes and images that aren’t very story-like.


The film opens with an elderly Dominic Matei in the late 1930’s realizing he will never finish his lifelong research regarding the origins of human language and cognition. Thinking about this failure, and the loss of his fiancee decades beforehand, Dominic plots a suicide attempt that is thwarted by a bolt of lightning. He survives extra-crispy, his doctor surprised to discover that the lightning bolt has restored youth to his body and mind. No longer 70, he emerges from the hospital a spry 30. This miracle attracts the attention of the Nazis who are eager to reverse engineer Dominic’s secret. He evades the Nazis through a cloak and dagger routine (complete with femme fatale, forged documents, and Matt Damon cameo) until the end of the war during which he discovers he need only pass his hand over a book to completely learn its contents. Such a talent makes his attempt to rediscover the origins of human language and cognition much more efficient. The film then leaps to 1955 in which through a series of misfortunes he discovers the spitting image of his lost love (now Veronica) in cave after having been … struck by lighting and granted a strange talent of her own. Dominic eventually discovers that her talent, which ages her when used, can grant him firsthand access to the first human language. Eureka. And then in a move that ultimately wrecks the film, it turns into a love story.


Though sluggish at points, the film keeps one interested in the potential of its ideas. Eliade described contemporary participation in myth/religion as an attempt at “eternal return.” Through religious behavior we attempt to return to the narrative time of our mythologies. And ultimately, this idea is at the center of Youth Without Youth; Dominic working through the mystery of language until he can achieve an experience of its first expression. The study of language, being his mythology, draws him more and more deeply into its range of mystical possibilities. This is pictured in the film as his sudden rebirth, the electricity that crackles as his hands leech knowledge from books, or the luminous blue glow that appears at significant moments. Eliade also spoke in great detail about the differences between sacred and profane space, and the thresholds that serve as place markers between the two. These thresholds, like church doors or treasured memories, are also indications of our attempts to abandon the here and now (profane time) for the narrative time of our mythologies (sacred time). The Eucharist, for example, is thought of by Christians to be either an act of memory that returns us momentarily to the death of Christ or the actual substantiation of Christ in our present time. Either way, it is an attempt to inhabit “sacred time.”


Youth Without Youth is a love story that treats language as a sacred space, its origin being a sacred time sought by Dominic. His great misfortune is that the very means of his experience of this sacred time conflicts with his love for Veronica, who represents a competing sacred space. His desire for her, which has skipped through many decades, eventually outstrips his desire to discover the origins of language. This would make the film a fairly basic story about intellect versus passion, developed through the wry exchange between Eliade’s ideas. But if this is the case, Coppola’s story telling gets in the way of both the intellect and passion that could have produced a set of memorable images and meditations on love and language.