![]() ![]() The protagonist-a 70-year-old professor at the end of a bitter life who becomes 35 again after being hit by lightning-is played by the gifted but not exactly bankable English actor Tim Roth. If it sounds Eastern European, it is: Coppola adapted the film from a Romanian novella and shot it in Romania and Bulgaria, in English, with a largely Romanian cast and crew. If that’s not theme enough, the film also bats around notions having to do with time and language. It will almost certainly prove to be the strangest mainstream movie of the year, with a narrative that dances along the sometimes slippery borders between waking and dreaming, reality and imagination, being and not being-the parameters of that slippery thing we call human consciousness. ![]() This December, Coppola will release his first film as a director in 10 years: Youth Without Youth, a romantic parable with a strong metaphysical bent. Unlike Welles, and thanks in no small part to those vineyards, his story looks to have a happier dénouement. Like Welles, he is also no stranger to grandiosity, bunkum, overreach, self-immolation, and red ink. It seems fair to say that he is one of the few American film directors who can match Welles both for talent and for showmanship-for sheer cinematic nerve. This was not the ending anyone aside from William Randolph Hearst would have wished on him. He spent his last decades scrounging for money to complete unfinished films, scrounging for more money to initiate new ones, and debasing his talent by acting in god-awful movies, TV shows, and commercials-shortly before his death he provided the voice for Unicron in the original, 1986 Transformers movie-in order to keep his head above water. (Oleaginous basso voice: “What Paul Masson said nearly a century ago is still true today: We will sell no wine before its time.”) Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70. He only got as far as shilling for it in those corny old Paul Masson commercials that were endlessly parodied in the late 70s and early 80s. Visiting Francis Ford Coppola one day this summer on his impossibly picturesque 1,650-acre estate in the Napa Valley, where 235 of those acres are planted with grapevines whose fruit was ripening in the noontime sun-the morning fog had just started to burn off-I couldn’t help thinking that Orson Welles should have made wine, too. The now independent filmmaker, photographed recently in Los Angeles-the belly of the beast. ![]()
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