Youth Without Youth

December 14, 2007

With a plot summary like this (and Tim Roth), how can I resist?

The film opens in Bucharest in 1938, where Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), a linguistics professor in his 70s, is planning to take his own life for reasons that will become (sort of) clear later. Before he can take the poison that he’s procured for the occasion, he’s struck by lightning and nearly burnt to a crisp. As he recovers in the hospital, tended by a kind doctor (Bruno Ganz), something inexplicable happens: His grey hair turns reddish again, his wrinkles begin to smooth, his teeth fall out en masse only to be replaced by new ones. He’s getting younger.

Along with his lost youth, Dominic has gained a döppelganger, a second Tim Roth who pops up in mirrors to advise him on the pursuit of his life’s goal: to discover the origin of all human language. With his brain supercharged by the lightning bolt, Dominic masters Chinese and Sanskrit in a snap, and is eventually—I love this detail—forced to invent a new language to express the complexity of his thoughts, which he records in an audio diary.

Of course, 1938 is a tough time to be, in Dominic’s words, “a strange superman of the future.” Soon he finds himself pursued by Nazi scientist Josef Rudolf (André M. Hennicke), who wants to experiment on his radically transformed body. Despite the best efforts of a sexy Nazi spy (that swastika embroidered on her garter belt should have been a tip-off), Dominic manages to escape to Switzerland, where he waits out the war while continuing his research.

Hiking up a mountain path some years after the war, Dominic thinks he sees the lost (and now long-dead) love of his youth, Laura, in the form of a woman named Veronica (both roles are played by German-Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara). But just moments after meeting Dominic on a mountain road, Veronica is struck by lightning, too, and winds up in a cave babbling in Sanskrit. Italian scholars are flown in—it’s not clear at whose expense—to confirm that Veronica is either possessed by, or the reincarnation of, a seventh-century Indian woman named Rupini.

As Veronica/Laura/Rupini proceeds to regress through the history of human language, babbling first in Egyptian, then Sumerian, then something like proto-caveman, Dominic gets ever closer to deciphering the Ur-language that will complete his life’s work. But will it be at the expense of his true love’s life?

[Read the rest of Dana Stevens' review in Slate]

Tags: cinema, film, movies