Closer

In the course of this film, the youngest of the four protagonists – and the one supposedly least wise about the world – describes an exhibition as "a collection of sad strangers photographed beautifully, which leads the glamorous patrons who attend these types of exhibitions to think the world is happy." Admittedly,  she uses a term far less flattering than "patron," but her insight amidst a nonstop stream of semi-profound statements and banal truths has a broader horizon that is hardly matched. Is the world really a miserable place, and artists (especially photographers and filmmakers, who make more direct use of their subjects) simply exploiters of the downtrodden to make themselves feel better about their privileges? This line of thinking has long been the battle cry of those who rail against art as superfluous and reduce the world to a compost of primal needs and disorders, bereft of any spirituality, any beauty, or anything more elevated than their own graying heads (this wretched lot knows who they are and should stay clear of these pages). But this is not exactly what the above quote means; or at least, it is not all it means. It also indicates that the artist and pessimist will never share the same tramcar much less the same soul. To achieve great art means believing in art, and believing in something inessential to the lusty cravings and itches of terrestrial existence means hoping that time will redeem your labor and crown it with immortality. Or perhaps we should just make do with aphorisms such as "you've got to respect the fish. We were all fish once," as another of our protagonists avers (somehow, this same character will later announce that, "without the truth, we are nothing but animals")? Like the title suggests, an examination of the film should not dawdle on the surface.

Our characters are four, a love trapezoid that provides gender balance: Dan Woolf (Jude Law), a failed writer and obituarist; Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman), a lost soul and waitress with a sordid past; Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts), a professional photographer; and Larry Grey (Clive Owen), a dermatologist. Both the women in our quartet are American, while both men are British, and the action takes place on the men's home turf. Unlike the all-too-popular hyperlink films in which the lives of strangers are interwoven by only showing us certain segments of their interaction, our protagonists are bracing themselves from the very beginning for a four-way head-on collision. Appropriately, Dan meets Alice when the latter is almost run over by a London motorist (a sure sign of an American), and when he takes her to the hospital unnecessarily, the cab driver asks him whether the young, bleeding woman he's holding in his arms is his, to which he replies in the affirmative. They begin a long relationship despite their age difference (about ten years or so; the actors themselves are nine years apart), lack of common interests, and general discrepancy in culture. That last assertion might seem a bit snobbish on my part, yet it is owing precisely to that unbridgeable gap that Dan finds himself attracted to Anna, who possesses the quiet, introspective tendencies of someone dedicated first and foremost to an art form. There is also the matter of Alice's previous line of work, which involved very little clothing, a fire pole, and dim lighting – an early admission that guides Dan's hand, so to speak. She's a stripper, the opposite of what we want in a woman, the opposite of art, because we want to earn every naked woman we see because we are ourselves, and not because we happen to own multicolored papers with holograms and famous dead people that can be traded, at our whims, for almost anything in the world. Even if Alice were not embroiled in something more debauched than stripping, the seed has been planted in Dan's idealist mind: my girlfriend is, was, or could very well become a prostitute, and he immediately looks for something purer among the pagan hordes.   

When he goes for a photo shoot to Anna's – Anna wants to take pictures of more ordinary people, perhaps hinting to Dan where he stands – they end up molesting one another, although Anna is obviously not interested and coming off a separation from her first husband. This indifference may not be obvious to a first-time viewer, but repeated examinations of Closer leave no doubt. Anna wants to be desired by Dan; she wants a nice, unsuccessful person to make her feel better about her burgeoning career (she is a few years older than the obituarist); but most of all, she wants someone who understands that artists can be the most gracious and the most selfish people in the world, oftentimes within the same mortal form. Dan, of course, is attracted to her creative mystique, her sullen devotion to her trade, and her mature acceptance of why life can be so painful. They do not advance past that first, teenagerish session, but as the months accumulate, Dan cannot let go of what he is missing with Anna because he is missing so much in Alice. Finally, via "the internet, the first great democratic medium" (Anna's bold words), Dan attaches Anna to the fourth point on our compass, Larry, a self-proclaimed "clinical observer of the human carnival." Despite his good looks and career, Larry cannot seem to find any happiness among all the young women who would stab their sister in the sternum to go out with a handsome dermatologist, not to mention the non-comedogenic advice that such a relationship would yield. The vulgar chatroom scene in which Larry is cajoled by "Anna" to meet her at an aquarium the next day will tell you everything you need to know about why Larry is alone. In any case, they meet, awkwardly, and – unbeknownst to a horrified Dan – start to date. Four months into their relationship, Anna has her exhibition, where Alice and Larry and Dan all converge, especially around the large picture of Alice in which she is noticeably teary-eyed, and which provokes the bitter quotation that began this review.

Even if you are unfamiliar with Patrick Marber's original staging, it is obvious that Closer was initially a play: there are, apart from a few quick moments, only four characters and they all talk far too much. This is the opposite of an adaptation of a novel, where quotations from the book are so decontextualized as to seem either utterly pretentious or utterly nonsensical (one particularly egregious offender is this film). Yet chatty plays are naturally inferior products because all of us have contexts when we talk to anyone, even to strangers; in fact, it is these contexts that lead to the majority of misunderstandings between people who have never spoken to each other before and, in all likelihood, will never converse again. The acting in Closer fluctuates from very good to phenomenal (Owen, who played the Dan Woolf character in the original play, is particularly superb), and carries a rather plain story to the precipice of excellence, contorting, along the way, banal truths into actual tidbits of insight about our four creatures. Dan goes back to the exhibition that fateful evening because he can't stay away from someone with equal artistic tendencies ("I haven't even seen you for a year," Anna claims coyly); Larry, on the other hand, is a physical beast, a man of science whose specialization is quite literally the surface of us all. The mismatching is fantastic, because it is exactly how so many couples operate, identifying something that doesn't belong to them as something that they desperately need. Even the music when partners are swapped is telling: Larry enters to something industrial in a club that screams carnality, while Anna and Dan meet at a rendition of this famous opera (inducing some critics to think that the opera and our film have some parallels, which might be pushing it a bit). The ending contains a couple of nice twists, and is relieved from one inevitability by the insistence of the male characters, in typical gender tendency, on knowing details that they probably shouldn't know. What type of details, you may ask? The details that allow you to hate or love someone so intensely that it devours your consciousness. And some people should really learn that asking questions ultimately leads to unpleasant truths. Maybe that's why animals usually look so happy.     

In a Better World

Translations of foreign film titles are rarely felicitous, but few seem as ill-chosen as the English rechristening of this film. Properly, the Danish Hævnen would be rendered as "an act of vengeance," or simply "revenge," not only a far more appropriate name given the plot, but also a more personal one conveying the basic moral premise of individual responsibility and individual consequences. Before a viewer is provided the opportunity to make up his own mind, however, the English variant implies that responsibility is shifted from individuals to circumstances, to a malefic world at large. This impression is rectified by the film's events, but not without some of the characters evincing a few doubts of their own. And especially dubious are two twelve-year-old schoolmates, Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen) and Elias (Markus Rygaard).

As is common in such friendships, Christian and Elias are bound together by each other's weaknesses. Christian is the newest student, obviously from a family of affluence as his last institution of learning was a London boarding school, but he is also, we learn early on, a victim of a great tragedy. Elias is a half-Swede whose father is conspicuously absent, although far from vanished. That Christian's father Claus (Ulrich Thomsen) chooses to move back to Denmark in the wake of his wife's final battle with brain cancer may strike the viewer as unusual, given that Christian probably has more family memories in his native land than abroad. That said, adjusting to a different environment remains one of the most proven methods of coping with loss (another method, working day and night with little concern for one's well-being, is the strategy adopted by Claus). This leaves Christian the time, resources, and lack of supervision he requires to wreak havoc upon the world that swallowed up his mother. His first step in avenging her is to defend Elias from a bully, a three-vignette sequence that yields a bloody nose, a brutal beating, the repeated intervention of the local police, and a weird and somewhat unconvincing truce. A more captious critic than I might object that the school bully, an Aryan thug by the name of Sofus, quits our view a little too quickly, having served only to solder together our two young protagonists. But the theme of bullying and vengeance is taken up anew with the appearance of Elias's father, Anton (Mikael Persbrandt).

The lone Swede amidst a passel of Hamlet's countrymen, Anton literally speaks his own language and is understood more or less completely. And while it is widely known that Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes have mutually intelligible tongues, the distinctions can (and, in our case, will) be used against the outsider. For a number of reasons, Anton emerges as the film's compass: he is the father of Elias and a smaller boy, Morten (whose name is tattooed above his heart); he is estranged from his wife (Trine Dyrholm), who cannot forget a past indiscretion; and, least importantly for our purposes even if, at first, quite the opposite may seem true, Anton spends half the year as a doctor in a never-identified African country (the local language and difficulties suggest Sudan). Africa in its most miserable regions has a tendency to render upper middle-class domestic disputes and coming-of-age stories woefully trivial, precisely the problem when the movie is not really about Africa, but about two boys in Denmark. Most lamentable about the half-dozen glimpses into a realm where few Europeans would be brave enough to test their moral fortitude is that the out-of-Africa quandaries eerily parallel the Scandinavian. As these scenes are discrete from the Danish episodes, the discerning viewer may secretly hope that Africa only exists in Anton's mind as a memory or wild dream of his conscience (alas, one vignette ensures us that this cannot be so). Predictably, therefore, Anton's healing of victims of hideous crimes, some of them the age of his own children, have drawn both the most praise and the most ire from critics, the latter of whom view the whole exercise as manipulative – but such an assertion misses the point. All cinema, even documentary, is manipulative: however nominally objective the director may be, you are simply never privy to the whole picture. This criticism is better directed at the non-diagetic music, which is most always cloying and which regrettably megaphones just when we need no reminder of the emotions we are supposed to feel at that very moment.

We have forgotten, in all this politically correct brouhaha, our unfledged heroes and their tribulations, but that's just as well. We know that the boys will embroil themselves in more than just a fistfight; we also know that they will lie both to one another and their parents as they deepen their hole with the keenest of spades. What we do not know and, indeed, herein lies the charm of such melodramatic machinations, is what if anything will be the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in a world that could and should be better, we are inclined to believe that people get away with much more than we could ever imagine. In a Better World clearly knows right from wrong (all too clearly, I fear, for many critics who likely gorge themselves on films they deem "morally ambiguous"), and what happens when the boys elect to avenge a perceived affront against one of their fathers concludes plausibly, if not necessarily as one might expect. This formula, if that is really the fairest term, has been previously employed by the director, with varied results. Bier's most famous film likewise urges the viewer to connect two very different worlds, yet does not end in atonement or even peace, but in a feeling that almost any emotion would be permissible, so wicked was the experience of one of the characters abroad (while this film, also about a Scandinavian doing wonderful things for the impoverished in a foreign country, is far more effective because the abroad is intrinsically tied to the plot). Nevertheless, as in all Bier productions, the acting is splendid (Dyrholm and Rygaard are particularly outstanding), and we are compelled to watch because these young boys are granted vivacity, fear, a sense of humor, purposefulness, and enough intelligence to be held accountable for their choices; at several junctures in the film, I distinctly felt I was observing sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. So when Claus confesses something very controversial to his son, and gets punched and insulted for his efforts, we understand why Christian has little if no compunction for his misdeeds and why, for him, the world could not be any worse. And we pity him just as much as any little boy anywhere who has been deprived of that most basic children's need, parental love. We just hope he knows that adulthood might show him how many other deprivations exist on this earth. 

The Fugitive

We have heard so often the story of the innocent man framed that it has become less of a fictional cliché and more of a reminder of our own first disobedience. Such a scenario is carved into the underpinnings of our nightmares, of how life can be snatched up and mutilated beyond recognition (some critics would love to emphasize our own repressed guilt in these instances, but most people's guilt is manifest and petty). What could be worse than being accused and convicted of a crime one did not commit? Loving the victim of that crime and knowing the true culprit perhaps, which brings us to this masterful film.

We know the accused will be Chicago physician Richard Kimble (a still-spry Harrison Ford). Kimble has everything that an average soul could want: he is cultured, financially successful, kind-hearted, attractive, and married to a ravishing beauty appropriately named Helen (Sela Ward); in other words, for the conventions of tragedy, he fits the bill quite well. We would not feel any sympathy towards a person of his privileges if he lost little, or if the person in question had nothing to lose at all. It is therefore appalling to watch our poor doctor enter his lovely home late one evening and find Helen bludgeoned and bloody beside a frightful-looking character (Andreas Katsulas), who in the ensuing tussle is revealed to have only one arm. One supposes it is important to have Kimble ostensibly exculpated from the very beginning so as to increase his pathos, although it hardly remains beyond plot twists to have had him order a killing anonymously. This latter option seems less likely when a filthy wealth of evidence, including life insurance benefits, points towards only one man. Kimble is arrested, tried, and sentenced to die by lethal injection with great alacrity, precisely because the sequence seems like a dream whose details could not possibly coincide with the real world. Throughout the entire proceedings Kimble retains a look of costive disbelief reflecting what he thinks of human justice; and as a man of science, he must know that law and its derivative vocations are as flawed and prone to misinterpretation as any lab test or vial. That he decides to operate outside the law is somewhat owing to happenstance: traveling on one of those prison buses that always seem to provoke mayhem, an aborted escape by another prisoner gives him his freedom − if being a hunted death row fugitive in a Chicago winter can be somehow considered liberty.   

On Kimble's trail comes the eminently cocksure U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones at his very best), who as a film character will resemble an artful codger or two from our own existence. Jones at the time of filming was in his mid-forties, four years younger than Ford. Yet his demeanor is distinctly one of a much older man who has seen and done everything necessary to prove that he is always right. Gerard does have less hair and more wrinkles than his co-star, as well as much less of a need to be in top running condition, but this palpable difference in generations extends into the strategies employed. Being an inveterate rule-follower, Gerard assumes that all success feeds off discipline, this deduction being especially applicable to a man devoted to the rules of nature and medicine. While police procedurals will regularly contrast those who think inside the box and those for whom volatile shapes would be the only means of caging their inventions, Gerard is not mistaken. What he simply does not understand, however, is the degree of indignation that Kimble feels (never mind that he spends most of the film under the presumption that Kimble was rightfully incarcerated). Why he does not know the greater limits of human emotion is not touched upon by the script; perhaps he has never been married or lost a loved one; perhaps he has always managed to treat life's vicissitudes as the function of his decision-making. At times we sense that Gerard would hardly be above gunning down his quarry at the slightest violation of his methods. 

This fundamental ignorance generates the tension required to elevate The Fugitive from the typical feline-rodent event to something grand and unnerving. The film has been compared by some critics to opera, and the comparison stands. The frost-ridden forests and icy pathways imbue the setting with a certain Wagnerian appeal, and the film's unusual length, often cited as its only flaw, actually aids in our concept of time: we cannot glance at our watches and estimate the next shootout, or even whether that shootout will ever occur. This lack of predictability coupled with Gerard's scene-stealing presence suggest that while we suspect Kimble will be ultimately acquitted, we cannot be assured that it will happen while he is still alive. As opera, we have a great hero, a terrible and earth-shattering crime, an unknown villain (one-armed men usually do not make good kingpins), and an ambiguous character who may act in the service of evil while attempting to do good − or exactly the reverse. There are many nice touches to the film, including a much-lauded vignette in which Kimble's Hippocratic oath trumps his own will to survive, but a few questions persist. Doesn't Kimble's flight argue culpability? Was it necessary to kill Helen when Kimble could easily have been out of town for business reasons? Couldn't there be a less conspicuous person to carry out an assassination than someone utilizing a state-of-the-art and not inexpensive prosthetic limb? Not that we are given too many chances to catch our breath and ponder such trivialities.

Brother

At several junctures in this film we are shown an electric streetcar with no sides, a hollow prism offering a glance at the skyline and sunsets of Russia's most beautiful city. That our streetcar is both transparent and unadulterated may be obvious; but it also masks desires. We are in what is called New Russia, where many have little, few have plenty, and a certain stratum has decided to take what they can before Death casts its shroud. And where does Death lurk? At almost every corner, in almost every alley, but not, most importantly, in every human soul.

Our first scene is like no other: a voluptuous blonde stands against a wall with her black dress peeling off her very white skin. Above her hovers a camera and we understand that what we are watching is counterfeit, synthetic, abstract, someone's concept of what reality should but never could resemble. We then espy a young man who seems to float into the picture asking a crew member what song is playing in the background. He is immediately spotted and berated by the head of security, a bored director contemplates momentarily whether he could use the impending brawl in his film, and as we fade to black our security chief is bounding bloody-minded through the crowd. 

The next vignette has our fellow seated in the local police station. He identifies himself as Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), twenty-two years of age, appropriately residing at the itinerant address of 22 Station Street, and a recent discharge from the Russian army. His wounds are visible but are nothing compared to what he inflicted on his assailant. Danila is offered a job which he politely refuses with a smirk, and as he leaves the police chief comments to a colleague and cold window pane that he was once his father's classmate. The same father who died at forty in a prison after repeated burglary convictions. Danila makes his way home to his mother, who laments in that strange way mothers have of trying to motivate their children that Danila "will croak in prison like [his] good-for-nothing father." Her "only hope" is apparently "little Viktor in Petersburg." This Viktor is hardly little. At least ten years older than his brother, he replaced Danila's father, who died when the boy was only seven, and what he has done with his life in the Venice of the North has not been revealed to anyone at this point; in fact, not even the film's title has been mentioned. The mother insists that Danila peruse once again the photo album she keeps of her beloved Viktor, shown aging into a bald, menacing figure, although Danila has no interest. Yet when his mother recommends a fraternal reunion in Petersburg, he is surprisingly receptive. Perhaps because he knows what his brother actually does for a living – and at this point we get our title and an introduction to a very different world.

We then find Viktor (Viktor Sukharukov), easily identifiable from the photographs, deep in one of those hard-boiled dialogues that involve money, death, or often both. His interlocutor (Sergei Murzin) is an odd, round-headed gentleman (nicknamed "Roundhead" throughout the film) who likes to talk in rhymes and has made his offer at fifteen thousand dollars and one week's preparation "to get a Chechen." Viktor brazenly dismisses this sum and wants twenty, half up front, and twice the time to track his quarry, to which the Roundhead readily agrees, although if we know anything about men of his stamp, quick assent normally indicates ulterior motives – in this case, an added assignment for his two flunkies. At another location in the same magical city, Danila detrains. He walks past one of Petersburg's most famous monuments and pauses, continues his walk around the city freezing, smoking and, most of all, observing. Why would an ostensibly impecunious young man not go directly to his brother's warm apartment? Because Danila has a plan that may or may not include his brother, but which definitely renders his repeated claims to only having served "in headquarters" more than a little dubious.    

This amazing survey is accomplished in about ten minutes of laconic screen time. The vignettes are always curt, almost like the pictures in the album Danila has been force-fed time and again, and perhaps for that reason is he the only one who anticipates the moves of others. He befriends an impoverished German (Yuri Kuznestov) whose penury has not diminished his philosophy, a junkie called Kat, and Sveta, a married thirtysomething woman who happens to be the driver of the aforementioned sideless streetcar. It is among these three characters as well as the morally vapid Viktor that Danila ricochets, and in time we detect the outline of his schemes. Blood is spilled, of course, but literally just off-screen – behind a wall or door, under a bed, from a distance – and Danila makes enough racist comments to disrupt an open-minded person's idea of justice. We are not dealing with a good human being but a criminal with a moral code; unusual surely, though no reason to cheer. Around him Danila sees the more conventional forms of revolution – drugs, long hair, loud music – but prefers his conservative do and this band on his omnipresent discman (which comes in handy in a later scene), and doesn't have any real taste for drugs, alcohol, or the deadening throb of disco bars. As a revolutionary he is most unconventional, which easily makes him the most radical figure in what would otherwise have become a straightforward tale. 

What distinguishes Brother from similar films is the deceptive innocuousness of its fairy tale surroundings and its protagonist, who despite his deep voice and playboy stare does some very adult things in a childish way. There is a hint of something greater at play than man versus man: it devolves into an entire city pockmarked by violent crime against one soul at once above and below the law. A familiar story, but told with such gusto and attention to detail (note how Sveta looks at Danila as he watches a pirated copy of a concert) that we cannot help but wonder whether the German is right when he says of Petersburg, "the city is a horrific force," and "the strong come here and become weak because the city swallows up our strength." And only once do we hear Danila justify his hell-bent tactics, to the German naturally, who can judge him without fear of retaliation. Not that retaliation could really motivate a clerk from headquarters. 

Youth Without Youth

There is a notion that people are not intimidated by great intelligence, but by great ideas presented intelligently. If you tell someone that religion can be boiled down to ten irrefragable commandments, or loving the one you're with, or the eternal return, or something that can fit on a business card or fortune cookie roll, they will smile because they have been initiated into one of the astounding mysteries of our world. It would be sad yet dutifully accurate to inform them, however, that the average person, even if somewhat well-read, would need at least ten years of intense study, incredible enthusiasm, and some cerebral propitiousness to be able to produce a first-rate book on religion or on literature. Of course, political correctness proclaims that all opinions are worth hearing and all viewpoints, regardless of education or perspective, are worth understanding. This I do not deny; these voices all have the same dignity, the dignity of human thought and feeling. But they do not have the same value. For value, you need minds who know their subject backwards, forwards and, in the case of this lush and beautiful film, also upside-down.  

Our hero is Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), a seventy-year-old Romanian scholar who wakes up one evening in the spring of 1938 and realizes that he "will never complete [his] life's work," that work being the chronicling of the origins of language. He decides, quite logically perhaps, to hasten this eventuality. As he potters around a meek Bucharest that already seems to hear the crunch of Fascist boots, Dominic is lifted off the ground, scorched by lightning, then dropped unceremoniously to wither and die. So violent and unexpected is this scene that it sets the tenor for the rest of Youth Without Youth: what has just happened is a miracle of miracles, thus disbelief is necessarily suspended. He winds up mummified in an intensive care station where he signals his name and age by squeezing the hand of Dr. Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), yet the nurses who wash his crisped body giggle in his presence and only half-jokingly claim that this man is still very young. In short order we learn the truth: right before Dominic awakes, his image in a nearby looking-glass opens its eyes, soon to be met by those of the original Dominic, now young, handsome and completely unscarred from his encounter with a million heavenly volts. If we weren't already convinced by the fulminous scene outside this train station, we now know that what we are watching is science fiction.

And yet perhaps this is still not the right term. The old Dominic inhabits many flashbacks: he loved a young woman named Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara) who essentially leaves him because he has not fulfilled his potential; he is also a diligent student of Chinese who is dismissed by a French-speaking professor (likely patterned after this Swiss linguist) because without a mastery of Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Japanese, he would not take him on as a student. "To master Chinese," says the smug old fellow, twirling his moustaches, "you must have the memory of a mandarin" – which is precisely what the new Dominic acquires. Soon he is able to know the contents of any book simply by willing himself to know them; he can predict the final destination of a roulette ball, move objects by telekinesis, and absorb information at a capacity that can only be called unearthly. He also keeps himself company, literally and figuratively, by discussing his agenda and feelings with a psychic double of himself. If this sounds ridiculous, you may consider that while he has now exceeded all men in pure intellect, he has not lost the human need for conversation with a peer. Stanciulescu publishes a series of incredible reports in a medical journal that garners the attention of scientists around the world. One of these observers has a notebook marked with a wicked symbol that will be mirrored (in perhaps an overlong shot) on the garters of "the woman in room six who was placed there by the secret police." That symbol has now become the most important in Europe, much more vital than all those Chinese characters and all the mathematical equations and all the plethoric knowledge with which Dominic has stuffed his rejuvenated brain. In other words, if that symbol survives, Europe perishes. 

As the war rages on in favor of that symbol, Dominic flees to Switzerland, but he cannot exist as anonymously as he would have hoped. At a professorial gathering of leading Swiss scholars ("I knew more than each of them; I knew things that they didn't even dream existed") he is again accosted by that lovely young lady from room six who just so happens to worship that repulsive, all-important symbol and who tells him of a Doctor Monroe ("He's Swiss. Like me. Like you"). When she adds, "you know, I do have a name," he refuses this feeble stab at humanity because the knowledge of her body was no different than the countless books he absorbed, pure information. Monroe, for his part, is interested in running a million volts through some test subjects for the sake of science – and I think you might guess who foots his laboratory bills. To the film's credit, once Dominic extricates himself from this situation, there is a drastic shift in both time and tone, with the second half of the film outyelling its predecessor and continuing Dominic's spiritual journey in ways he could not possibly have imagined. And since they are beyond his own horizon, at least initially, we too will struggle to grasp why Laura seems to have been reincarnated in a young student by the name of Veronica, and why this may not be the only exemplar of metempsychosis that Dominic will witness.

While I am galled by the chocolate box of accents in English among the cast members, however realistic that has now become in the world (I invariably prefer unanimity of dialect), I should add a few words on the negativity of many of the film's reviewers. Youth without youth was a critical failure, particularly in America, for one very good reason: it holds almost no universal appeal. That some reviewers even stooped to labeling the film kitsch reveals a fundamental ignorance of aesthetic theory. Kitsch (and the closely related Russian term poshlost') tugs at the emotions by reducing them to the solution to all plot developments and all questions of character. A Hollywood film that pumps soft music against a still softer sunset and the embrace of two extremely good-looking young people who have only exchanged platitudes for two hours as bombs and bones detonated around them is the epitome of kitsch. Kitsch expects you the viewer to relate to the on-screen happenings because these emotions and lives and loves and hopes are common to all people at all times, and therein lie its eternal sadness and purported – and utterly fraudulent – artistic credentials. All this has absolutely nothing to do with the plight of Dominic Matei. The youth regained embodies the cerebral life Dominic always wanted, and it is his and his alone. He is granted by some Almighty force the time necessary to finish his life's work (a plot device probably borrowed from this famous tale), but then realizes that while he may conclude his intellectual existence satisfactorily, he will never again be a happy, love-struck youth, whereas precisely the opposite predicament would feature in a film devoted to cheap schmaltz. What is legitimately and artistically tragic in Youth Without Youth is that the wisdom and memories Dominic accumulated in the years before the lightning do not permit him to enjoy things with the same sense of invincibility that usually accompanies our early adulthood. He may be young in body but within him shudders the tortured soul of an immortal who has outlived every love and passion. And what can we say about those three roses? Only that Laura may not be one of them.