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Friday 5 December 2008

Worshipping perfection

Elegy
15, London and Key Cities

Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal’. Elegy. Ageing. Roth. Dying. Sick. And yet this movie is such fun! Hats off to the director, Isabel Coixet, for infusing it with candy colours and setting it to a kitsch yet funky Seventies pop soundtrack. OK, only teasing. This is gloomy. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt so gloomed. It is a very brown sort of film and there is a great deal of piano tinkling.

Our protagonist is Kingsley’s David Kepesh, a celebrated cultural critic and professor at Columbia who is in his sixties and who has spent most of his life serially seducing his female students (but not the plain ones, as he worships physical perfection; I think I’d have been safe). He is a rutting stag of a man and wholly unashamed in this respect, a fact driven home by the candid voice-over which explains how he avoids getting charged with sexual harassment: ‘I never make contact with pupils until they get their grades.’ I do not think I’d fancy him — don’t you rut near me, old fella — but plenty do.

Consuela does, somewhat amazingly. Consuela (Cruz) is one of his graduate students; a beauty from a Cuban family. He seduces her and they embark on an affair which, for him, is different this time. This time he is haunted by the differences in their ages and his knowledge that it will not last. ‘This girl will never tell me she yearns for my cock,’ he says mournfully at one point. Well, I should hope not. (Honestly!) He is counselled throughout by his best friend, a New York poet as played by Dennis Hopper. ‘Beautiful women,’ says Hopper as poet, ‘are invisible. No one can see the actual person. We are so dazzled by the outside we never make it to the inside.’ I am sure there is some truth in this but, seriously, would you take advice from Dennis Hopper? I suppose one should always look beyond the casting, but it’s Dennis Hopper for Christ’s sake!

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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