As if you couldn’t tell by the title and the cast, “Youth” is a movie about the passing of time and how we may differ in our approach to dealing with the inevitability of death that awaits us all and the possible futility of life and what we take from it while in the moment. A story about lost loves, dashed dreams and broken hearts, as well as appreciation of the past, hope for the future and a strange optimism for the present, this is the kind of movie that can affect you emotionally but only if you let it, if you allow it to wash over you, burrow into you and meld with your own psyche, so that you can see yourself reflected in at least one of its characters.

Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a retired composer and conductor enjoying a quiet and lazy vacation at a hoity-toity resort in the Swiss Alps when an emissary from the Queen of England visits him to ask if he would come out of retirement for one performance for the Queen and her grandson. Fred refuses to do so for “personal” reasons, but the invitation throws him for a bit of a loop, as he wasn’t prepared to even think about doing something like that, and now it is making him feel some emotions that he’s been stowing away for years. His past as a hugely successful conductor is closely linked to his wife, and now in this moment in this resort he is thinking about her with obvious regret as to how he lived and what became of her (something we do not learn the full extent of until the end of the film). It doesn’t help that his personal assistant is also his daughter (Rachel Weisz), and when her husband leaves her for a pop star, she has her own breakdown and vents by yelling at her father and accusing him of being a shitty husband and not the best father. Not exactly what a person wants to hear in the twilight of his or her life.Continue Reading …