Francis Ford Coppola and "Youth Without Youth": A new career in filmmaking

Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum — like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language and human identity — but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Seeing "Youth Without Youth" for the first time this summer, I tried to resist the impulse to imagine parallels between the filmmaker and his hero. Was Coppola trying to recapture something of his own youth in telling this story? Was Matei's state — a predicament as well as a blessing — also, in some way, the director's own? Did this project, a return to filmmaking after a long hiatus, represent an attempt to turn back the clock and start again?

Having been trained to be skeptical of easy biographical interpretations, I dismissed such questions as too obvious to take seriously. My high-minded, theoretically correct determination to avoid them did not last long, however. When I spoke to Coppola on the phone a few weeks later, he was quick to suggest the connection himself. "I'm really a lot like the man in the movie," he said.

Read the full article on iht.com here.

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