Name : Elegy
Genre : melodrama, drama
Director : Isabel Kuakse
Year : 2008
Country : USA
Budget : $ 13,000,000
Duration : 108 minutes.
The story of the relationship between David Kepes (Ben Kingsley) - a college teacher and young immaculate Hispanic Consuelo Costilo (Penelope Cruz), whom he meets in New York. He is a lone playboy who literally took the slogans of the sexual revolution, leaving his wife and children in return for sexual carelessness. She is the only daughter of a Catholic family of Hispanic immigrants. And the apparent gulf between them becomes the soil for a scorching novel, which threw Kepesh out of insane irresponsible ties into the whirlpool of love afflictions and jealousy ...
In 2001, the crowned and honored Philippe Roth (repeated nominations for Nobel, the Pulitzer Prize, a few more awards of a modest modesty) produced one very remarkable book - The Dying Animal. In 2007, for her adaptation, Isabel Coixet took, and the adaptation of the literary work was taken up by Nicholas Meyer. The aesthetic Isabel ("Paris, je t'aime", "My life without me", "The Secret Life of Words") placed the accents a little not where they were conceived by the author of the original source. But this, perhaps, is a matter of taste and angle of personal worldview.
The main roles were almost immediately approved by Ben Kingsley, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Paz Vega, but on the set instead of Paz appeared Penelope Cruz. The replacement was never explained, and the Internet community began to wonder: why would it? The wittiest version sounds like: "This was done in order to maintain the proportionality of the ages of the characters and actors." Like, Kingsley is older than Cruz all for the same thirty years ... But about this - below.
Once an adult man consciously made a choice: he changed the boring, but family life, to a boring, and, accordingly, non-family. Thus, a classic inner drama began: the struggle between hedonism and common sense within a particular individual. This struggle in the minds of the main character passed with varying success for the time being, until the time. Time has come / lo somewhere in the area "after fifty": then hedonism gradually (as it happens) has grown into a banal cowardice, inertia and inability to cope with difficulties.
Why did this happen, after all, if you look closely, life was a success, and everything turned out almost as you wanted it to be? Almost everything except one: the professor grows old, irresistible and irrevocable. And this natural process, he is very much afraid. In addition, classical classical drama is mixed not less than the classical drama external: the mesalliance or "... it suits your father". In general, he is a professor of literature, she is his former student. First they have sex, then love, then crisis and misunderstanding. Between them - a great education in both, thirty years of difference, a constant friend "for health" and a friend for talking "about it." Of course, they will not succeed ...
The plot, in principle, is trivial. But nekučen and in this particular case looks fresh - in this merit, no doubt, Penelope Cruz (she took the ideal body) and Ben Kingsley with his reflections. The best moment of the film: the death of a friend with conclusions that need not be voiced, but they clearly and unambiguously hang in the air.
So: a lot of eroticism, a lot of naked Penelope Cruz, many reflections and conclusions. Very adult, thoughtful and sensual film for those who have something to think and feel.
Natalia Rudenko