Youth Without Youth

Aroview: Joining a recent glut of Dorian Gray-like fantasies, this Francis Ford Coppola comeback (following a 10 year sabbatical) centres on a Romanian lingusitics professor who, struck by lightning, finds his youth restored.

After a long absence, dir. Coppola turns in a film that seems executed as a comic-book indulgence; a quality indulgence, nonetheless. Tim Roth as the backwards-aging protagonist delivers signature dry drollery, and Copolla playfully douses his canvas with inventive camera technique and impressionistic motif. The plot is rangy, and, like a Pynchonesque adventure takes geeky delight in code-languages and arcane learning, Nazi arcanonologists and impending apocalypse, Eastern mysticism, a dash of metempsychosis, and exotic locations, from the Hindu Kush to Malta.