Youth (2015)

Paolo Sorrentino's Youth deposits two aging artists in a five-star Alpine spa and lets them marinate in regret for two hours. Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel wander the corridors, exchange wistful observations, and occasionally levitate a monk. The cast is a parade of white European and American faces, assembled with no apparent interest in diversity. A masseuse and a Miss Universe drift through the frame as decoration. Nobody remarks on it. The film has other concerns, chiefly the sound of its own elegance.

The women here are permitted their grievances. Rachel Weisz's Lena delivers a fine aria of resentment toward her distant father, and Jane Fonda's Brenda arrives to dismantle a director's legacy with relish. These are moments of agency, not a thesis. The camera belongs to the men and their fading memories. An overweight Diego Maradona appears as a visual punchline, which sits poorly with any contemporary sensitivity about bodies. The wealthy guests consume and lounge, and the film observes them without a flicker of class critique. There is no racial commentary, no environmental anxiety, no queer presence, no neurodivergent interiority. The resort is a bubble, and the film is content to keep it sealed.

The film offers instead a melancholy, impressionistic drift. Sorrentino stages surreal asides (Hitler, cowbells, a pop video) and asks nothing of the audience beyond patience and a taste for beauty. The film never lectures. It mourns. That restraint is its saving grace and its limitation. A lesser director would have turned this material into a sermon about mortality and meaning. Sorrentino simply lets the old men sit by the pool, and the pool says nothing back.

For the record, this is a 2015 European art film about wealthy white men reflecting on death. Its social consciousness is minimal, its casting homogeneous, and its politics essentially absent. We classify it accordingly, with the solemnity the task demands and a faint sigh of recognition. Some vintages are simply not built to challenge anyone, and this one prefers to shimmer quietly instead. It shimmers well. It challenges nothing. Both facts belong in the ledger.

The classification record notes no Oscar wins, though the song received a nomination. It is not a sequel, remake, true story, book adaptation, or superhero property, and it never reached the top of the domestic box office. A quiet, gorgeous film with nothing to prove and nothing to preach, which the ledger respects even as it marks the empty columns