Legendary American directors don't die without first touting their faded wares in Europe, where they know at least the scholarly French will warmly receive them for their past glories. See most blatantly Woody Allen, followed here by Coppola, with a determinedly artful and high-concept history-spanning tale centred on an aged Romanian professor (Tim Roth) struck by lightning in 1938 and subsequently finding himself not only rejuvenated but intellectually supercharged. This then enables him to continue on his meaningful quest for a human proto-language, guided by the reincarnated love of his youth (Der Untergang's naive narrator, Alexandra Maria Lara), who then becomes his muse as she also gets the gift, hers in the form of regression into further and further past lives.What follows is a bombardment of Roth pontificating in every language under the sun and namedropping a modish spread of philosophical and religious sources to convince us of his erudition, and the story jumping from country to country to convince us of the global reach of its significance. Coppola has effectively gone on a supermarket spree for disparate ideas and tones and this is hammered home in the casting which manages to include several more actors from Der Untergang, including Bruno Ganz burbling on amiably like a Werther's Original granddad as Roth's doctor, not that Roth, reading from autocues between quips, or Lara, offering only beatific or hysterical, fare any better. It all ends up a pretty pseud's mess bewitched by its own sense of profundity. Also see Aronofsky's The Fountain.
5/10
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