Francis Ford Coppola Discovers Yayati

The greatest English film I ever watched and keep watching is “Coppola's The Godfather” (1972). It’s like reading Mahabharat.

A O Scott, dependable film critic of NYT reports on September 9, 2007: “YOUTH Without Youth,” Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian’s memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time…

Mr. Coppola’s movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language and human identity — but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?”

This reminded me of Indian mythological story of Yayati.

“Yayati was a man of amorous disposition, and his infidelity to Devayani, his wife, brought upon him the curse of old age and infirmity from her father, Sukra. This curse Sukra consented to transfer to any one of his sons who would consent to bear it. All refused except Puru, who undertook to resign his youth in his father's favour. Yayati, after a thousand years spent in sensual pleasures, renounced sensuality, restored his vigour to Puru, and made him his successor.”

Yayati is a fascinating story and needs to be told by as good a director as Coppola.

Marathi writer V S Khandekar wrote an award (Jnanpith Award 1974) winning novel on the subject but for my taste, it’s a bad work. (By the way along with Vijay Tendulkar, Khandekar is the most popular Marathi writer outside Maharashtra. At IIT Madras, in early 1980’s, my Tamil speaking friend told me that they had a good writer in Tamil called Khandekar!)

Medicines like Viagra and the scalpel of a plastic surgeon have changed the definition of youth now.

BENEDICT CAREY reported for NYT on August 22, 2007 “Most Americans remain sexually active into their 60s, and nearly half continue to have sex regularly into their early 70s……”

Today’s male Yayati is likely to be all pharmacy and female Yayati all surgery!


Artist: William Hamilton The New Yorker May 15, 2000