"Of all meditations, death is the greatest." Supposedly the Buddha said this. Whether or not that's true, we can still work with the statement. I turned forty this year, and it wasn't without self-reckoning. The expected lifespan of an American male in 2023 was 75.6 years. If I'm lucky enough to reach that figure, I'm already a little past the halfway point of my life. What's (potentially) left? So much. What's already passed? For one, the idea of a future with no borders. Confronting the finiteness of a life is a task far too expansive and deep to fit into a blog post (or anywhere), but that's not the point of writing this. The point of writing this is to commend Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 gem Youth, which, through the assured and measured performances of Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, and the appropriately experimental cinematic brushstrokes from Sorrentino, explores the loss of what one has lived for, which is the same as dying, even if you're still alive. Sorrentino is no stranger to death and variations of, both in his personal life (he became an orphan at 16) and in his art (he directed The Great Beauty), but even if he was, Caine and Keitel, both well into their 70s at the time of shooting, bring the gravitas necessary to make this kind of film work (Caine's and Keitel's characters seemed to have lived mostly for women and art at the expense of much else, but still). It's the kind of movie I would've yawned my way through at 25, when I assumed the future was wide enough for everything I wanted to do with it, but the kind of movie I can't wait to rewatch at 40, when the movie's meditations on death, both subtle and overt, ring with that bittersweet chord of letting go.
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