Youth Without Youth

“Francis Ford Coppola has made Eliade whole again.”

Well, you all know who Coppola is, but I suspect for many of you Mircea Eliade won’t ring a bell. He was a well-known scholar of the History of Religion, Mysticism, Myth, Reincarnation, and the Paranormal. In addition to his scholarly work he wrote novels that expressed some of his knowledge in another form. Romanian by birth, with most of his books published in Europe, his final years were spent in the US, at the University of Chicago, where he died in 1986. Coppola read one of his novels, YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, published in 1976, and he decided its subject matter, Time, Mysticism, the Paranormal, and the transmigration of souls, would be a great challenge to translate to film, something he hadn’t done for ten years. He took some of the money he made from his successful winery in northern California and decided to make the film in Europe where it would be less expensive to make and would reflect the world and geography of the written story. The quote above comes from an appreciation of the movie by another scholar of the same subject matter, Jeffrey Kipal, who gave it a fairer hearing than most professional film critics, who were pretty baffled by the movie and put it down because they were. It is a difficult and complex movie about tricky subject matter, but it is worth seeing and thinking about.

Here are the basic facts of the narrative. Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is a 70 year old academic in Romania who is unmarried, lonely, and ready to commit suicide because he has not been able to finish his magnum opus, a book about the origins of language and consciousness, which he has spent his life writing. There was a girl in his past, Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara), who he intended to marry, but she broke it off due to his obsession with his book. While in Bucharest on Easter Sunday in 1938, he is struck by a bolt of lightning as he is crossing the street in a thunderstorm. It is a direct hit but somehow, miraculously, he not only survives but after long months of recovery he emerges a new being, what Kipal calls a “post-historic man.” He loses all his teeth but new ones come in; he looks like a man of 40 not 70 with a full shock of brown not gray hair, and he has extraordinary powers of memory, thought, and “supernatural” powers, like telekinesis. He is also sexually reborn. The electromagnetic blast catapulted him into the future; evolution has reached new heights in his new person. But he is cautious at first about who and what he has become. Only his doctor (Bruno Ganz) knows the complete truth about what happened. In sum, he seems to embody what future humanity has the potential to become.

Does this sound familiar? I thought of the X-Men right away. Like them, Dominic is a “Mutant Marvel.” This is a much different take on the idea but the core idea is the same. But news of this Mutant Marvel finally reaches the Nazis. While he was recovering the doctor protected him and encouraged him to dig into his memory; he often dreams about Laura and many other things. He more or less retrieves his personality. One particular Nazi doctor wants to study him, like he was some kind of bug, but Dominic escapes his clutches by using telekinesis. He revives his life of study and eventually meets a girl named Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), who is none other Laura come round again—reincarnated—so the two of them get a second chance. (The original Laura had died young in childbirth.) But it isn’t all that simple. In a weird twist of synchronicity, Veronica also gets struck by lightning, on a trip to the Alps. He finds her in a cave; she is in a dreamy state, can only speak Sanskrit--he does too-- and she says she is a student of some 14^th century Indian guru/philosopher that Dominic knows about. An Italian Orientalist comes from Rome to authenticate her story. (In the novel it is Buddhologist Guiseppe Tucci and depth Psychologist Carl Jung, experts in real life.) . Eventually she returns to herself and she and Dominic go off to Malta to be alone. Love blossoms like it never had a chance to in the past. But then she starts to regress again, going back to Egypt, then Mesopotamia, speaking the language of both places, and then to a mysterious place with an unknown language. Dominic is very excited that he is getting close to his lifetime’s goal, but there is a hitch. In an inverse relation to what happened to him after his rendezvous with the flash from the heavens, Veronica ages beyond her years (25) with each regression. ( I have met a number of European men who have had this idea of women being the ground of being and vessels they can use to transport themselves by mental powers to other dimensions of consciousness.) He realizes if he pushes her any farther she could die, so he leaves her for a second time, for her own good. We later see a picture of her, once again young and beautiful, with two kids. Dominic has gone full circle so he heads back to where he started from, at his old university, now 88 years old but still looking 40.

For those of you who intend to see the film I will refrain from discussing the ending. For it to have impact you must be open to the closing. Some of you will have figured it out. And I do hope you see it, as it is worthwhile. There is much in the narrative that I haven’t touched on, like Dominic’s alter ego, who we first see in a mirror and later the two of them have dialogues about what is going on, somewhat similar to Kevin Costner and William Hurt in “Mr. Brooks.” There is also the mysterious story of the three red roses.

Finally, a word about Coppola’s skills. He still knows how to put images together and he handles color relationships very well. All the set pieces are excellent, authoritative. Nothing on that level has been diminished by time and winemaking. He also coaxes a very fine performance out of Tim Roth in a difficult role, one in which he has to speak in several languages and write with Chinese characters.

It is now available on DVD.