Youth

There's a fine line between profundity and cliche.  Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino walks it like a pro.  He understands that the key is to strip things away to their essence.  He doesn't pretend to have any great key to the mysteries of life.  The honesty is refreshing.

"Youth" is "about" several people vacationing at a spa in the Swiss Alps: a retired composer (Michael Caine), his daughter (Rachel Weisz), an aging director (Harvey Keitel), and an actor (Paul Dano).  The daughter goes through a divorce with the director's son.  The director struggles to write his new movie.  The composer demures on offers for performances and memoirs.

But this all makes the movie seem far more conventional than it is.  Typically, Sorrentino presents a spare scene of dialogue, ending on a key line.  He then shows images from around the spa.  Frequently he blasts in music--his taste is terrific--to create an atmosphere, only to suddenly cut it out.  When all else fails, he's not afraid to lean on some gorgeous images of the Alps.

Sorrentino's an experimenter, and not everything works.  (A character based on Diego Maradona, with a giant tattoo of Marx on his back, comes to mind.)  Like Altman, Sorrentino discovers the movie as he goes.  But he's got a destination in mind.  For a while, it seems like this movie has no point, until suddenly it does: you either keep looking forward, or your die.