Do film directors really walk around peering at the world through the frame of their joined hands? They do it often enough in the movies—but that’s where it counts, because the rectangle of fingers resides inside the larger frame of the film itself, turning the character into a camera and his experience into a movie within the movie. The final shot of Paolo Sorrentino’s commanding philosophical drama Youth shows an elderly filmmaker making a viewfinder with his hands in just this fashion, and it’s appropriate to a film that, while dwelling primarily on the discontents of old age, also considers the creative problems of movie people and, more specifically, the friction between their work and their own sense of self.
Jimmy Tree, the intelligent and discerning young actor who befriends both Fred and Mick at the hotel, suffers from a similar confusion, though instead of translating his life to the screen he’s trying to figure out what his screen work means to his life. Patterned on Robert Downey Jr., Jimmy has become a celebrity playing a robot called Mr. Q in a worldwide blockbuster, and the crush of people who know him only for this frivolous role is beginning to get to him. His roles allow him to connect with strangers, a power he craves as an artist, but the best known of them has become an identity he can’t escape. Brenda Morel, the brittle screen goddess who roars into the hotel for a meeting with Mick, has about 40 years on Jimmy, and she’s figured out what her screen work means to her life—nothing. Sitting in the hotel lobby with Mick, she announces she’s quitting his film to do a Mexican TV series, pronouncing his last three films to be “shit” and his artistic vision to be hopelessly constricted. “All you know how to see is your own death,” she declares (which seems pretty ironic given Mick’s difficulty in scripting just that). Her heartless exit line—”Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit”—seems like a challenge not only to him but to Youth itself.
