Francis Ford Coppola's first film for nearly a decade has Tim Roth as a 70-year-old professor of linguistics, disappointed in life and about to commit suicide, when he is struck by lightning and badly burned. When he wakes up he discovers his teeth are falling out but - lo and behold! - new ones are forming. His youth is miraculously restored.

It's 1938 in Bucharest, and this amazing transformation attracts the attention of Nazi scientists, forcing him into exile. Haunted by memories of his lost love (Alexandra Maria Lara), his one remaining wish is to complete his magnum opus on the origins of language. His new lease of life offers him hope of completing it unless the Nazis get him first.

Soon more strange things occur, including the appearance of his own double, a doppelganger who is not as harmless as he is. After the war he falls for the apparent reincarnation of his old love (Lara again) and watches with fascination and horror as she begins to speak in ever more ancient tongues. We are soon off to India to discover an old tomb with the skull of a woman inside.

One soon begins to think of all those old and silly Time Machine movies. But this is a movie based on a novella by the philosopher Mircea Eliade, so we are obliged to take it more seriously than those. It gets increasingly difficult.

The problem lies principally with the screenplay, which often lapses into cliché. But even the direction is sometimes clumsy, which is a considerable surprise from the man who made Godfathers I and II, and Apocalypse Now.

In short, and with some regret, I have to report that this is a weirdly unsatisfactory movie, codswallop set before us with a strange lack of real cinematic conviction. Perhaps Coppola has been drinking too much of his own wine. But he's young enough yet to make another masterpiece.