ScreenWize

It was Bette Davis, we are reminded in Isabel Coixet’s beautiful film Elegy, who said that old age is not for sissies. Successful author, lecturer and broadcaster David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is staring into the mouth of old age, and finds that his life is empty and meaningless. Having divorced his wife many years previous, David keeps intimacy at arms length, maintaining a long-term but very casual affair with out-of-towner Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), as well as the occasional affair with his students, although only after they have already received their grade from him. He targets his charm on student Consuela (Penelope Cruz), and despite the warnings of his closest friend George (Dennis Hopper), finds himself obsessive and jealous and extending the relationship for much longer than his instincts tell him.

The dynamic of the sexual relationship between an older man and younger woman is often explored, unsurprisingly, by older male directors, and so Spanish director Isabel Coixet breathes a different sense of energy into this tale, adapted from a Philip Roth story. It mines a rich vein of themes around sexual obsession and longing. Despite Kingsley’s character’s academic detachment and misogyny (“making love to a woman is,” he says, “opportunity at revenge for everything that defeats you in life”), he finds himself pursuing Consuela, although like a work of art he wishes to possess rather than as a loving partnership.

Kinsley says that Cruz’s character has an elegant austerity to her, and the same could be said of this film. Coixet operates her own camera, and she achieves a terrific sense of intimacy between the characters. Her cast are all superb. Dennis Hopper is for once restrained, Debbie Harry, though only appearing briefly, is terrific. Kingsley is always good, but the film belongs to Penelope Cruz. I had never fallen for her charms before now. This is the performance she should have won her Oscar for. The dialogue, adapted by Nicholas Meyer, is honest, unflinchingly at times. In musical terms, an elegy is a melancholic composition, and to its sombre, mostly piano-driven score, there is much to look for and later reflect on in this film. However, perhaps in keeping with the idea of the elegy, Coixet’s film does suffer from a lack of pace that is at times frustrating.

CK

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon