The Consequences of Love (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004)

Cast: Toni Servillo, Olivia Magnani, Adriano Giannini, Antono Ballerio, Gianna Paola Scaffidi, Nino D'Agata, Vincenzo Vitagliano, Diego Ribon, Gilberto Idonea, Giselda Voloni. Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino. Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi. Production design: Lino Fiorito. Film editing: Giogiò Franchini. Music: Pasquale Catalano.   

One Man Up (Paolo Sorrentino, 2001)

Cast: Toni Servillo, Andrea Renzi, Antonino Bruschetta, Angela Goodwin, Nello Mascia, Peppe Lanzetta, Stefania Barca, Italo Celoro, Clotilde Sabatina, Marzio Honorato, Rosaria De Cicco, Roberto De Francesco. Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino. Cinematography: Pasquale Mari. Production design: Lino Fiorito. Film editing: Giorgiò Franchini. Music: Pasquale Catalano. 

Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in Youth

Fred Ballinger: Michael Caine
Mick Boyle: Harvey Keitel
Lena Ballinger: Rachel Weisz
Jimmy Tree: Paul Dano
Brenda Morel: Jane Fonda
Queen's Emissary: Alex McQueen
Julian: Ed Stoppard
Paloma Faith: Herself
Miss Universe: Madalina Diana Ghenea
Masseuse: Luna Zimic Mijovic
Sumi Jo: Herself

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Music: David Lang

Woody Allen

Is it just accidental that in Youth, wearing a slouchy hat and dark-rimmed glasses, Michael Caine often looks like Woody Allen? Or is Paolo Sorrentino suggesting some kind of connection between Caine's character, a reclusive composer-conductor trying to drift into retirement, and the prolific but scandal-plagued writer-director? The resemblance might have been more on point if Caine had played Harvey Keitel's part, a writer-director trying to put together what turns out to be his last film, meanwhile obsessing on the lost past and approaching death. But then nothing quite fits together right in Youth, a somewhat scattered and occasionally enervated film. Caine's Fred Ballinger and Keitel's Mick Boyle are old friends -- there is even a suggestion, not followed up, that they may once have been lovers. They are also tied by the fact that Fred's daughter, Lena, is married to Mick's son, Julian. Fred and Mick have come together at a spa in Switzerland, Fred to undergo medical examinations, Mick to work with an entourage of screenwriters to put together the final touches on a script that's meant to star one of his longtime collaborators, the actress Brenda Morel. Also on hand, as a kind of confidant for both Fred and Mick, is a young actor, Jimmy Tree, preparing for a film in which he would play Adolf Hitler, an attempt to counter his popular image as the star of a sci-fi movie in which he played a robot. Sorrentino tries hard to bring together all the threads of each character's plot, including the breakup of Lena and Julian's marriage, Fred's resistance to a command performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and Mick's difficulties in coming up with a final scene for his film. But the pacing of Youth is too slow, and the manipulation of the themes of youth and age, past and present, too superficial. Caine and Keitel are two of the most dynamic actors ever, and Rachel Weisz and Paul Dano are certainly worthy of their company, but Sorrentino tamps down their energies. The only time Youth ever comes to life is when Jane Fonda finally makes her appearance as the aging, rather blowsy Brenda, in a performance that reminds us how good she has always been. She delivers the worst news Mick could imagine: that she has decided not to appear in his film but to do a TV series. But Sorrentino follows up her scene with one that feels ripped off from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), in which Mick, like Fellini's Guido long blocked from completing his film, finds himself surrounded in an Alpine meadow by the women from his earlier movies. It's not so much shamelessly derivative as it is pointless. Sorrentino is a formidably imaginative writer-director, as demonstrated by his dazzlingly off-beat TV series The Young Pope and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) -- also indebted to Fellini but with a more inventive twist. Youth has touches of inspiration, but too often gets snarled in its own plots.

Cinemax     

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)

The great beauty referred to in the title of Paolo Sorrentino's film is Rome itself, which for millennia has transcended the ugliness that has overrun its seven hills. It's a city whose beauty and ugliness are seen in the film from the point of view of Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who is celebrating his 65th birthday as the film begins. Jep first received acclaim 40 years earlier for a well-received novella, but the rest of his life has been spent as a celebrity journalist, interviewing and gossiping about the rich and famous. This career has earned him his own fame and fortune -- he lives in a luxurious apartment whose balcony overlooks the Colosseum. He's a bit like a straight Roman Truman Capote. The Rome in which Jep moves is filled with absurdity and excess: a performance artist who runs headlong into an ancient aqueduct; a little girl who has made millions by splashing canvases with paint and then smearing and tearing at them in a tantrum; a doctor who maintains a kind of assembly-line botox clinic in which patrons take numbers as if they were waiting in a delicatessen; a saintly centenarian Mother Teresa-style missionary whose spokesman is an oily dude with a shark-toothed grin; an archbishop considered next in line for the papacy who can only talk about food; and hordes of glitterati who spout inanities that they think will pass for wit. The Great Beauty is a satire, of course, but oddly it's a satire with heart: Jep Gambardella's long-since-broken heart. Servillo is terrific in the key role: elegant and cynical, but also capable of exposing idiots for what they are. Jep and the film in which he appears have obviously been compared to Marcello Mastroianni's character in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), but Jep is less jaded than Marcello, less ground down by the decadence. And Sorrentino's view of his Rome is more genially ironic than Fellini's carnival of grotesques. Beautifully filmed by Luca Bigazzi, with a score by Lele Marchitelli augmented with works by contemporary composers like David Lang, Arvo Pärt, John Taverner, Henryk Górecki, and Vladimir Martynov, The Great Beauty was a deserving winner of the 2013 Oscar for foreign-language film.