Another Language

A Young World tries to speak about the restless spirit of modern youth in timely catchwords. A fille de frug wearing topless finery is whisked aloft at a wild students' ball in Paris. Sean Connery appears briefly, creating instant Bondomania. The troubles in Viet Nam and Santo Domingo are touched upon. Finally, Hero Nino Castelnuovo, as a young Italian making the Paris scene, comes right out with it: "Don't you feel a new world is in the making?"

Not yet, apparently.

In his first French-language film, Director Vittorio De Sica updates his vocabulary but views the lively young set through a mist of weary Old World romanticism. The plot loses its cool at the outset by dwelling on the miracle of love at first sight between Castelnuovo and a shy medical student, played by Christine Delaroche, a movie newcomer in the Susan Strasberg-Geraldine Chaplin tradition. Shortly, boy gets girl, girl gets pregnant, boy gets nervous. The rest of their time is spent agonizing over an imminent abortion while the camera strives to fill every pause with poetry. Young World is a perfectly well-made, perfectly dull movie--and a rather embarrassing one, coming from De Sica. He has obviously heard the music that the new generation swings to, but the flip, hip challenging vitality of it has not got through.

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