Elegy [Blu-ray]

I just found the whole thing tedious, wish fulfilment, and an excuse for Ms Cruz to get her kit off.

Nothing wrong with that, but she seemed a bit old for the role, and there wasn't much else to the story. The dialogue seemed horribly stilted, and the Kingsley character just not particularly attractive for the totty magnet he was supposed to be in the film

This is a beautiful movie, well cast well made and a story well told.

I am sure that there will be criticism from viewers who do not have the patience to follow the story through but then that is part of the charm of the film.

The film begins with the narration of a semi-celebrity professor crowing over his ability to seduce students after their graduation from his course as a confession of the abuse of his position to fuel a lifestyle of selfish self-promotion.

When he meets a student who does not fall immediately for his charms he becomes enveloped in a relationship which awakens feelings that he had previously not encountered. we learn about him from the conversations he has with his best friend and the confidences they hold about each other and from the interactions with two other significant characters, his estranged son from a failed marriage and a woman with whom he has a casual yet regular sexual relatonship.

Our knowledge about the student is released slowly rather like peeling the layers of an onion and we follow the relationship which becomes soured by his obsessive jealousy and selfishness. Eventually that selfishness overcomes his feelings of love for the woman and she disappears from his life although the aftermath of their breakup dogs him as he struggles to come to terms with that and the implications of it.

In a conclusion which is not as the plot has carefully laid out, the couple are reunited through a tragic event which allows their feelings to be exposed.

This is a tender, slow drama which goes to a great extent to establish the network of relationships between a few people in order to bring forth an analysis of how modern life in a post-industrial society has resulted in fragmentary relations involving sex without love or care and where real relationships are the exception rather than the rule.

Each of the actors involved have gone to considerable trouble to avoid extreme positions to create very real and reasonable people who have considerable credibility. Not for everyone perhaps but a very rich film to watch and ponder upon.

More than anything this is a beautiful film, with incredible visuals and cinematography by Jean-Claude Larrieu, and intelligent and beautifully directed scenes by Isabel Coixet. Having previously read the novel that inspired the film, "The Dying Animal" by Philip Roth, I found this to be a faithful adaptation, with only slight changes. In the film, David Kepesh is English rather than American, and his son is a doctor rather than in the fine arts business. But these are merely slight changes and the core of the story remains; Kepesh is beautifully portrayed by Ben Kingsley. He is, more than anything, a pathetic, shallow old man, slave to his desires and clinging to his long-lost youth. He knows his condition is absurd and makes no bones about it, although his shameless pursual of young women quickly made me lose sympathy with him. One particularly touching, recurring scene occurs in a cafe, where Kepesh and his friend George drink tea. George (an amazing performace by Dennis Hopper) tells him his theory about beautiful women; that they are invisible, and that no one can see them, because no one ever gets past the shell of the outer beauty. Close to the end of the film, he inquires of Kepesh: "Did you ever really see her? I mean all of her." To which Kepesh replies: "I didn't understand what I saw...she was this weird clutch of inconsistencies." And George replies, "You're talking about her in the past sense". This alludes to the ending of the film, in which Kepesh is faced with the choice of carrying on loving a woman he is no longer in a position to appreciate at face value. Will he leave because she is no longer beautiful, and remain the shallow, exploitative man he always was, or will he stay?