YOUTH        directed by Paolo Sorrentino

 

Please watch this on a big screen, and then again! - having looked at all the Art books' photos you can find, or googled photos of Angelic Renaissance sculptors and painters.

 

I don't want to spoil the stately reflective wisdom and beauty of this film for anyone seeing it who isn't already into Renaissance painting, sculpture, frescoes, murals and classical architecture, and also Impressionist art. The film works well without any conscious reference to any of that! It is deeply respectful and has several very important messages - most poetically and simply stated by various characters. For me the most important three were:

ONE:

Touch and understanding and communication through silent touch is essential to health and happiness and more or less eliminates the need for wordy, egotistical, competitive, intellectual waffle - and yet, - how people don't touch or get touched enough - out of fear of their emotions and an inability to be free. The buck-toothed skinny masseuse who states this as she massages Fred (Michael Caine) on one of his otherwise silent daily sessions, likes to dance for herself in an art-of-movement, oriental way in front of a camera and screen that dresses her in flowing fairytale light and so she is an angel of mercy and happiness this way, - as we see in many frescoes and paintings especially Botticelli.

TWO:

How the intention of portraying happiness and being simply, quietly happy is primary, and Hitler's character was used here in a surprising way. So the very old retired friends - Fred the composer/conductor and Mick the film director - with the actors creating and rehearsing his last little project film,- come together in a Swiss mountain Health Spa, where the regime of sauna and hot stones, reflexology and steam and hot pools and medical check-ups, is rigorous in a nunnish, monkish monasterial way.

THREE:

Accepting aging and getting soothed by nature is good! There is a forgetful hazy mirage that appears as Mick and Fred walk the meadows around the hotel into the woods... The meadows remind me of a very famous painting by Monet, of ladies and children walking down through a poppy field below their (distant!) manorial home. This also reminds me of present day photographer Fergus Reid's fabulous photo of deep meadow flowers with a central red poppy, although I am glad to say that in his instance the focus is so sharp there is no fuzzy forgetful veil, and his photos also work brilliantly 'big screen' size. But having said that Fergus can also create photos with a 3D textured feel like a painting - (but no forgetful veil!)

 

The cast of 'Youth' are placed in settings where they mirror famous paintings, portraits, and frescos - in dark, rich colours. - Ancient bodies sedated statically - misted in steam.

The Doctor looks like Lorenzo de Medici.

One of the actors looks like his son Giuliano - who was murdered by Savonarola with the Pazzis en plot.

The in-house hotel prostitute is shown dressing in a client's room and becomes a pleated short skirted young Renaissance prince-Cherubino, as she dresses to leave and he regards her - as he leans calmly sated against his old hotel room wall - like an ancient picture himself - draped semi-naked and tanned in a classic pose.

The male bearded actors are lying - heads in a circle, - chatting about the film's possible ending - heads together like a group of apostles on a cathedral or chapel roof.

 

The female actress poses to confer with a fellow actor against an ancient balcony that is straight out of Medici art.

Miss World comes for a week's holiday - part of her prize for her win! - and she is Venus - born and naked full circle, as she enters the hot pool and luxuriates on the gently sloping, shell-like! edge and is also seen from below the water (of the sea?!) as she floats. She is model Simonetta - as Botticelli adored and painted her... But when she arrived the night before after dark and was introduced to fellow guests at a candlelit dinner table, she looked nothing like a possible Miss World - but was yet another image of the much-Catholically wronged, dirtied and derogated Magdalene - as Donatello and Botticelli and others portrayed that truth of, honestly. How disappointed Mick and Fred were until next day at the hot pool! WOW! Now we have more than Miss World - We have Aphrodite...

 

Simonetta? Well I can hardly believe the synchronistic gift of this film to me as I have just completed reading the trilogy by Kathleen McGowan- 'The Expected One', 'The Book of Love' and 'Poet Prince'. I urge you to read all these too - maybe before you even see the film! Poet Prince made me get out loads of library books with Renaissance painter's work in and google Donatello's wooden sculpture of Mary Magdalene and the bronze sculpture of the slaying of Medusa. I can’t thank Kathleen enough for her inspiration to my enlightenment!

QUIZ time!

WHO, in the film is presented as Medusa? (not the male bronze medusa slayer, but she herself) - and WHO as Donatello's wooden, scratched, disrespected, broken Mary Magdalene?

 

There are many more mirrors of famous art and buildings from Rome to Venice as well as Florence - and a mirror is also part of the Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene = of 'hieros-gamos' = yin-yang = shiva/shakti love. Kathleen has researched all this meticulously and channeled much of it too and describes the relationships between artist's, patrons, models and their families and friends in a delightful way.

The lady who is Venus in 'Venus and Mars', and 'Fortitude' in the virtues dozen (and while pregnant with Lorenzo de Medici's baby in Primavera - smiling on the The Three Graces-) - and is also shown in the 'Birth' painting - seeking to protect the shell-born emerging Venus - who is a naked, pure, natural, innocent Eve-like beauty in the 'Birth', - by billowing a cape over her,- is Columbina (Lucrezia)- Lorenzo's heiros-gamos eternal soulmate.

 

Fred is depicted seated royally in a red cape - as a Cardinal perhaps - as Mick stands on a chair on the balcony edge and the subsequent sound track indicates he has suicided off it... BUT he is later seen happily smiling remembering all his film heroines in that meadow!

The camera work here is stunning. 90 degrees focus point change - from Mick looking anxiously at the switched off, static seated Fred against the ancient hotel wall - to Fred long distancely and still unmovingly, observing Mick's balcony exit.

There are dream and nightmare sequences from frescoes of hell! - and technical stuff that seems amazing to me.

There are jokes and funny scenes as Fred teases Mick and one shot where they see a very formal couple who never speak at table, in the wood, screwing up against a tree, and Fred hands his gamble stake over his shoulder to Mick who is hiding just next to him, observing them from behind another tree - this close up composition of a simple silent shot is also straight out of a background of a Botticelli or a Lippi or Fra Angelico or Piero della Francesco studio artist, but it’s not the shot that is shown when googling the film.

SOMEONE please make a video stills 'film' - placing all these classic art works and the background cameo sections in them, just before the film shots.

Paolo has created a master fresco here - a modern renovation of stunning beauty and information. -  It would make a great Uni or Art school project.

Go also to 'The Last Commission of Leonardo da Vinci' by Fiona Maclaren and 'The Gospel of Mary Magdalene' by Michele Roberts - for slightly different histories of Jesus and Magdalene's Love and Life after the resurrection...(Life after Death for those with eyes to see and ears to hear!)

There are so many symbolisms in Botticelli and all the angelic artists and EVEN Da Vinci - who the brothers and San Sepulchro secret society didn't reckon was an 'angelic' when he started -       but he learned! - as Fiona explains! - Painted symbolisms of the lies the Catholics and hair-shirt, perverted, women-hating monks wanted to insist and hang on to, murdering so-called heretics of this Sansepulcro secret society and genociding the Cathars and hedge herbalists...

The jars many Magdalenes carry represent the kilos of Myrrh and other lifesaving herb oils that Fiona researched - that mended Jesus before he got up (resurrected!) - and was smuggled away in small boat and eventually maybe via Alexandria and after spending quite a time in Lyons en route, went up to the Scottish Isles with Magdalene. The pilgrimage STARTS from Compostela - not ends there!

Enjoy warrior Duchess Matilda in 'The Book of Love; - heiros gamos with Pope Gregory 7th and find out what the maze is really about - see in Chartres and Lucca for two places.