Youth is a 2015 movie by the Italian film maker, Paolo Sorrentino, starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel.

 

1. Remember how cool Michael Caine was as Alfred – Batman – well he gets even better playing a sarcastic retired composer.

He is playing Fred Ballinger, a retired music composer, who is in a luxury SPA resort in Switzerland for his holidays. He doesn’t really care anymore what people think of him.

The movie opens to Michael Caine, talking to an emissary of the queen and refusing to perform his “Simple Songs” (his most famous music piece). How cool is that?

 

2. You won’t get the chance to see a grandpa as a hero of a movie often:

It is rare for a movie’s main character to be an old person. It is even more rare if that person is not famous. And even more so if the movie is actually good – which it is.

The main character is not too cliché.

Yes, he has problems that comes with aging: loss of memory, less vigour, distachement. But he is also really witty and sarcastic, and is still pretty active.

Yes, they do speak about their prostate and their loss of memory, but it’s only small chitchats, and it’s not what define them.

 

For you to enjoy! 

 

3. And you won’t get bored: 

Although the movie is not a comedy – far from it – you will laugh, more than once, and might even end up shedding a tear or two.

Sorrentino masters the filming and plunges the spectators into an ever changing visual impression. To long aesthetic travelling shots with opera music, succeeds, swiss countryside walks, close up on weird angles and crazy dreams – shot real – scenes.

Apart from Fred and his friend, there is a lot of different characters : his heart broken daughter Lena, an actor in need of inspiration, a young massagist passionate about Dance evolution, a former – grown obese – soccer star, a current Miss Universe, among others. So you end up with characters from completely different environments, and with a quite impressive age range.

 

4. It might make you look smart in a dinner:

The film explores great – almost philosophical – themes: aging, memory, love and aging, memory, love and thirst for further fulfillment.

Especially if you reference back the movie to some other cultural items, such as Thomas Mann’s “Magic mountain”, which also happens to be taking place in a sanatorium, and has the same melancholic undertone.

 

5. You could even learn a few things about life:

Although the movie is named youth, it has more to do with growing older, experiencing new things and trying to go on.

Friendship can last foreverish: Fred and Mikey, know each other since childhood, and they are still getting along great. Fred’s daughter at some point is surprised by the fact that they don’t share all their life events and that they don’t always know all that’s happening in each others life, to what both reply “we only share the good stuff”.

Accepting your past is key to living in the present. All of the characters are somehow haunted by a part of their past. And ultimately the ones who try to avoid confronting it by going forward without looking back, are the one ending up miserables. The question is not whether you will suffer loss or not, but how you deal with it and get over it. It might not be the happiest life realization, but it is a pretty realistic one.

Relativise your everyday actions, they might not have as many consequences as you believe. Fred and his friend notice how few they remember from their childhood and agree that in the end no matter what you do, people will tend to forget. So carpe diem.

 

SPOILER

One last lesson you can derive from that movie is that there is hope. Although the movie has a pretty melancholic undertone, despite all the funny parts, can give a rather gloomy vision of life at times, it ends on a clearly hopeful opening. The monk that Fred made fun off because he could not levitates, does levitate at the end, rising in the sky above the mountains. The composer who did not want to lead his masterpiece does, and the daughter who was afraid of change confronts with her fears.

Raphaëlle Barbier