Paolo Sorrentino: ‘I never use a crude approach to showing the naked bodies of older people’
After winning an Oscar for The Great Beauty, the director had the pick of Hollywood for his next film, Youth. Why was he so keen on persuading the British veteran Michael Caine to step up?
Andrew Pulver Friday 15 January 2016 08.10 GMT
F
rance has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in Europe, but they don’t cut much ice with Paolo Sorrentino. Having taken over an upstairs bar in Paris’s St-Germain-des-Prés to hold court, the Oscar-winning film-maker is openly puffing on what can only be described as a stogie. Coupled with a pair of unexpectedly luxuriant sideburns, Sorrentino looks like he might have just staggered off the set of a Sam Peckinpah western – which, you suspect, is just how he would like it.
Youth: watch first trailer for new Paolo Sorrentino film with Michael Caine
Youth sees Caine as an ageing composer with mournful gaze and slicked-back hair in a trailer that comes on like Sorrentino’s previous film, The Great Beauty
Andrew Pulver Monday 13 April 2015 16.27 BST
The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a hard act to follow, what with its astonishing central performance from Toni Servillo (both ecstatic and world-weary) and wonderfully rendered images of a sublimely beautiful Rome. But director Paolo Sorrentino has got to try, and the trailer for his latest, Youth (La Giovinezza), has just emerged – shortly before it will, no doubt, appear in the lineup for Cannes (due to be announced on 16 April).
So what do we make of Youth? We know the plot outline involves Michael Caine playing a semi-retired classical composer, and Harvey Keitel as his film-director pal, on holiday in the Alps; and that Caine gets a summons from the Queen of England for a final concert. The trailer majors on Caine, giving it the full Servillo with mournful gaze and slicked-back grey hair. His is the only dialogue we hear: “You are right. Music is all I understand.” We get glimpses of the cast’s other well-known faces: Rachel Weisz (prone, covered in mud); Keitel and lady companion; Paul Dano, with slightly improbable moustache.
A swooning love letter to Roman decadence, La Grande Bellezza is the Paolo Sorrentino's greatest film yet Peter Bradshaw Thursday 5 September 2013 15.29 BST
P
aolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza is a compelling tragicomedy of Italy's leisured classes in the tradition of Antonioni's La Notte or Fellini's La Dolce Vita. It is a pure sensual overload of richness and strangeness and sadness, a film sometimes on the point of swooning with dissolute languour, savouring its own ennui like a truffle. But more often it's defiantly rocking out, keeping the party going as the night sky pales, with all the vigour of well-preserved, middle-aged rich people who can do hedonism better than the young. It is set in Rome, populated by the formerly beautiful and the currently damned, and featuring someone who doesn't quite fall into either category.
Rachel Weisz, who will appear in Paolo Sorrentino's Youth.
Photograph: Jeff Zelevansky/Reuters
Rachel Weisz joins Paolo Sorrentino's new film Youth
Ben Beaumont-Thomas Tuesday 6 May 2014 08.44 BST
Following the success of his Oscar-winning film The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino's next project Youth has snapped up a welter of Hollywood acting talent: Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Jane Fonda and Paul Dano are to join the previously announced Michael Caine.
Youth review - age cannot wither Michael Caine, but Sorrentino could try harder
***
Michael Caine is excellent as a retired composer opposite Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda in this strangely sweet-natured opera of pathos
Peter Bradshaw Wednesday 20 May 2015 11.45 BST
P
aolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting, minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have come from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, grotesque faces and angular perspectives, and it always watchable. But it’s beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos — Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her keep. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with. The title has literary resonances with Conrad and Tolstoy, but the youth evoked is mostly that of young women and young women’s bodies, whose allure never fades for men as they get older.
It is all incarnated
It is all incarnated in Michael Caine, whose face here is an inscrutable mask of worldly disillusion, breaking occasionally into a droll smile: he plays retired British composer Fred Ballinger, currently fending off requests from the Palace to conduct a special Royal Command performance of his early masterpiece Simple Songs. (Fred is supposed to have been an intimate of Stravinsky’s — but this music sounds more like Britten pastiche.) He is undergoing a health check-up at this luxurious state-of-the-art sanatorium, although as he says: “At my age, getting in shape is a waste of time.”
Fred is there with his best buddy Mick (Harvey Keitel) an ageing movie director, here with his production team, brainstorming a new film set to star his old diva friend, played by Jane Fonda. Mick’s son is married to Fred’s daughter and assistant Leda (Rachel Weisz) who actually shares her dad’s bedroom. There is also an LA movie actor Boyle (Paul Dano), another sufferer from that popular condition: self-congratulatory cynicism, who is preparing for a certain historical role, and astonishes everyone at the spa by appearing one morning in full costume and makeup. The two old guys, Mick and Fred, go into a kind of arthouse version of Statler and Waldorf, and they stroll around the grounds, grumping away, torturing themselves by whingeing about their prostate worries and perving over the current Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) who has won a stay here as part of her prize and turns out to be smarter than anyone thought.
There has already been much comment online to the effect that Caine is playing the kind of role that might otherwise have gone to Sorrentino’s longtime collaborator Toni Servillo, and it’s true that Caine’s air of sticken ennui does remind you of Servillo. But actually Caine is very good in the role, he brings something different, a distant fatherly charm.
If only the film was not so (mostly) marooned in that single location. When the action cuts to memories and fantasies of Venice, where Fred conducted an orchestra, the film suddenly comes alive with power and movement: there is a stunning tableau of St Mark’s Square underwater. Even a very quick scene with Jane Fonda losing her temper on a plane frees things up a bit: but mostly we are drifting around the handsome facilities and grounds of this sumptuous but weirdly soulless open prison with its massages and its heated pools.
There is a poetic richness in Youth which occasionally emerges as Mick and Fred talk about what they can remember of their lives, and Mick’s realisation that there are huge stretches of his own life that he can simply no longer remember: his own youth is more or less a complete blank. It is an idea which is more terrifying than piquant: more disturbing, arguably, than anything Mastroianni’s director faced in 8 ½ — though he himself had youth more or less on his side.
Sorrentino has a basic level of fluency and verve. Anything that this film-maker places in front of his camera is always arresting to some extent: there is a superb shot in which Fred and Mick spy on an elderly couple having sex in a forest: a shot replete with comedy, absurdity and alienation. I am already looking forward to another more substantial Sorrentino film, though there is pathos here, and sweetness.
As our countdown of the ten best movies of the year nears the end, Xan Brooks revels in Paolo Sorrentino's astonishing satire on la dolce vita
Xan Brooks Thursday 19 December 2013 11.43 GMT
The "king of the high life" is heading for a fall in The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino's astonishing satire on la dolce vita and the withering flesh. Here is a film that casts upper-crust Rome as a circle of hell, at once beautiful and damned. It arranges its citizens (crooks and cardinals, sinners and saints) into such a woozy, drunken conga-line that it becomes impossible to tell where one body ends and the other begins.
Everyone, it seems, is tangled and compromised here. They are drunk on excess and staggering towards the balcony's edge - and that may well include the film-makers themselves. The Great Beauty, widely regarded as an acid assault on the Berlusconi era, was bankrolled in part by the old rascal's Medusa Films production house.
Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambadella, our tour guide through the ruins, a jaundiced celebrity journalist who possesses the power to make or break a party by a casual, barbed comment or a curl of his lip. But Jep is in his 60s; he knows that time is running out. More crucially, perhaps, he knows that it's been squandered. He pines for the lost love that got away and for the writing career that might have been his, had he only knuckled down to write a second novel. In the meantime his long, dark night of the soul carries him back and forth beneath the illuminated Martini sign (a neat Roman twist on the eyes of Dr Eckleburg) in search of meaning, entertainment or alcohol, whichever comes easiest.
It is clear from the start that Gambardella is doomed. But his swan-diving descent has a ravishing intensity. Sorrentino takes his subject (the impeccable flaneur, just beginning to rot) and sends him spinning out amid a whirl of exotic flotsam and grotesque little side notes. Jep's revels bounce him from the anguished child splatter-painter ("she makes millions") to the dessicated old nun, 103 last birthday, who sleeps in a cupboard and can name all the birds.
I loved The Great Beauty to bits; it's my film of the year. Try as I might, I can't recall another recent picture that is so rich, so full, or so elegantly staged. Sorrentino's camera glides and swoops, wafting us seamlessly from one tableaux to the next. In the process we become like visitors at a museum, not realising that each fantastical new exhibit, each further step on the schedule, is actually leading us closer and closer towards the exit door. Soon we shall be gone and the world will continue. So drag your heels and stop the clock. Take an extra moment to gawp at the glory, just as Jep stops in his tracks to gawp at the amazing vanishing giraffe. The giraffe appears out of nowhere, it shouldn't be there. It idles in the arena for a few brief moments, before the floodlights are switched off and the city goes dark.