Coppola/Murch: Second Youth By Joe Cellini

After ten years away from directing movies, director Francis Ford Coppola is back with a completely different kind of film and a radical new approach to filmmaking. Shot on a shoestring budget in Romania, Youth Without Youth, adapted from a novella by Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade, wraps a serious exploration of time and consciousness in the exotic trappings of an international thriller and love story.

And while anyone looking for a Romanian Godfather (“Leave the gun, take the gogo?i.”) might be disappointed, true fans will thrill to the customary Coppola visual opera — quotidian scenes lifted to the sublime through framing and lighting; high-level acting, especially from Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an aging professor of linguistics rejuvenated by a lightning strike; and virtuosic direction of complex shots and sequences — all exquisitely integrated with orchestration and sound.

After decades of work-for-hire directorial efforts for studios to pay off debt accumulated from the demise of his ambitious Zoetrope studios, Coppola has found a way to make a film in his own style and of his choosing. He was introduced to the works of Eliade by his childhood friend Wendy Doniger, a religious studies professor at the University of Chicago. After his long-planned film project Megalopolis, about a new utopia in a near-future New York, was undermined by the real world events of 9/11, Coppola shifted his interest to Eliade’s novella. Says Coppola: “I suddenly thought: ‘I can make this into a movie. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll just start doing it.’”

Coppola admits that like the lead character Dominic, he was stumped by his inability to complete his next important work. “At 66, I was frustrated,” he says. “I hadn’t made a film in eight years. My businesses were thriving, but my creative life was unfulfilled.”