Just as Megalopolis could be seen as a parable about Coppola’s own empire — Zoetrope, circa One from the Heart — Youth Without Youth is frequently seen as Coppola’s parable about his struggles and dreams around the then-30-year-old project. What if one could start over? What if one could start over younger? What if one could start over younger and wiser and better? This was a mere surface-level concern of Mircea Eliade’s novella Youth Without Youth, but Coppola — recommended the book by his good friend, religious scholar Wendy Doniger — instantly emotionally connected with this structuring device. Coppola always had a penchant for scholarship, especially when it came to his longest-gestating project about power, history, debt (a very personal subject for the director), and the values of humanity; Eliade’s work was meant to supplement Coppola’s struggles with how religion would fit into his Utopia, especially since Eliade was much better known as a religious scholar himself. But, like his other adaptations, Coppola found a story about himself in the text.
Speaking of scholarship, the movie itself centers on an unfulfilled linguistics scholar, Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), who, at 70 years old, still has not completed his life’s work — his only work — on the origins of language. Despondent about a wasted life, winning neither a legacy nor his lifelong love Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara, who also plays Dominic’s other loves and obsessions, Veronica and Rupini), he decides to kill himself in picturesque Bucharest. Then, perhaps, divine intervention: a bolt of lightning strikes him, halving his physical age and granting him a fantastic memory. He can read, comprehend, and remember the smallest details of every language and the contents of every book. He’s a scholarly Superman; or perhaps, since the Nazis take an immediate interest in him, Übermensch. Lest this be kept strictly in the realm of sci-fi and Nazi mad scientists, a ghostly double (again, Tim Roth) also appears and acts simultaneously as guardian angel, shoulder-devil, and a philosophical sparring partner, even prodding Dominic into a discussion of what the double could be in their first conversation. He’s eventually led to another such miracle case, Veronica, who may be a reincarnation of Laura, and who seems to be regressing into her past lives, speaking each older language fluently. Dominic learns and transcribes languages from other continents such as Sanskrit (hardly a coincidence for the Indophilic Germans), Egyptian, and Sumerian, eventually arriving to people speaking a language more ancient than his studies suggest; all the while, these regressions have taken a physical toll on the now-haggard Veronica. Dominic must fight his double over what means more to him: his life’s work or his life’s love.
Though he’s never fully abandoned Catholicism, Coppola, like the religious scholars just a bit older than him, longed for some sort of universalist connection among the major religions, less as a way to degrade each individual religion, and more as a Tower of Babel that would reduce our petty strifes and improve mankind’s ability to solve our most ancient questions. The excitement over such a prospect is inherent in Dominic’s ability to speak multiple languages, his ever-present double (an angel? some non-Christian heavenly emissary? or, secular as it may sound, an ego-break?), and his later understanding of the social niceties inherent in Sanskrit, or the details of the Upanishads, or the direct transmission of ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, proto-Elamite, and Sumerian to the tongue of Veronica. Likewise, there’s cynicism in such a prospect, inherent in the Nazis capturing Dominic for their own, rather than humanity’s, power. Since this book was originally intended to supplement Megalopolis, it’s no surprise that Coppola is most concerned with the sometimes-benevolent, sometimes-catastrophic power inherent in both religion and language.
But, there are plenty of other Coppola parallels here: Tim Roth’s double arguing that he never finished his book because he cared about Veronica’s (Eleanor, the Coppola family) well-being too much, a fetishization of legacy and perfection and completion, the strange responsibilities that come with even a benevolent sort of power, and dreams. Scenes of dream interpretation mark Eliade’s combination of his own religious studies with Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, but Coppola saw dreams as the best parallel to the language of cinema, that even photographs and the written word couldn’t come close. For him, there are the terrestrial dreams, such as Tucker’s dream of the car of the future or his own dream of a completed Megalopolis; there’s also dream language, perhaps the proto-language that Dominic sought, where time may jump, long-dead characters reappear, and where one may stare at oneself without a mirror, and the audience, by some miracle, understands it. But while the history of cinema might aspire to this dream language — with even that best-selling genre of Golden Age Hollywood, the musical, demanding the audience accept characters breaking into song and dance — how does a project explicitly about this get made?
This being the first film completely independently financed by Coppola (just like Megalopolis, wine was a primary investor), it’s also his most formally audacious. Apocalypse Now had the realistic napalm bombing sequences and One from the Heart recreated Fremont Street in a studio setting, yes, but Youth Without Youth builds entire sequences on dream structures. Kaleidoscopic waves act as establishing shots, dream creatures (Shiva, the double) hop in and out of the Godfather-sepia’d reality, the camera inverts at 90 and 180 degrees, and story structure takes a backseat to abstract discussions about metempsychosis and love. If Megalopolis is Coppola’s dream project, Youth Without Youth is his project about dreaming.
Philosophy itself doesn’t travel very well to the screen — it’s a profession filled with too many ands, ifs, buts, footnotes, jargon, and a long history with the written word rather than the burgeoning language of cinema — but philosophical inquiry might. Philosophy is not dreaming, though it may be something of a distant cousin, one who can order, analyze, and demand a rigor the dreamy cousin normally shakes, while the dream may break philosophy out of the silly rules and boundaries it sets for itself. Perhaps we’ve lost something by dismissing the interpretation of dreams. After writing about cinema for over a decade, and in writing about Youth Without Youth in particular, I feel it to be worthwhile.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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