Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel bring the benefit of age and experience to a misfiring tragi-comedyItalian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s first English-language feature This Must Be the station (which preceded the Oscar-winning The considerable Beauty/La Grande Bellezza) was an awkward affair that cast Sean Penn as a Robert Smith goth-a-like living in Ireland,embarking upon an American road trip in pursuit of a Nazi war criminal. Really. Youth is altogether more assured, although nonetheless strange – a hazy meditation on admire and death interspersed with weirdly melancholic celebrity cameos. It plays out in a glamorous hotel-cum-health-spa at the foot of the Alps, or where retired composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) refuses a royal invitation to conduct his popular score Simple Songs,while film-maker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) assembles a group of young writers to compose his film “testament”, the ominously entitled Life’s final Day.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com