Cast: Ben Kingsley & Penélope Cruz
Director: Isabel Coixet
Rating:
Enetertainment Quotient: 20%
Genre: Romance
Runtime: 113 min
MPAA rating: R for sexuality, nudity and language.

Synopsis:
David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is a Pulitzer award winning author and a literary professor. He is alone and has no emotional bonding with anybody. He is fascinated and sexually inclined towards some of his female students. His modus operandi is simple. He chooses his prey and waits till the grades are given after 1st semester. Then he throws a party at his house and invites his students. He awes his prey with his intellectual insight and then invites her for a coffee or drink. His latest prey is Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) – a Cuban American student. The only mistake David did was to get emotional about the relationship. He gets jealous about her. His noncommittal stance about meeting her parents infuriates her and she leaves him forever. The rest of the story is all about under which circumstances they meet each other again.

What I liked in the film?
This movie starts as an immoral film projecting a horny relationship between 60 year old professor and his young female student. As the time passes, the film dwells into various other aspects of the professor. Ben Kingsley is awesome and charming in the role of a professor. Penelope Cruz is endearing as a young woman who sincerely falls in love with a 60 year old professor. The piano notes which forms as background music for this film are good.

What I did not like in the film?
The movie becomes too sentimental in the end and the latter part of the film is pathetically slow.

The scenes I liked?

1. There is a dialogue in the movie which goes like - When you make love to a woman, you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life.

Tailpiece: Elegy is adapted from the novel ‘The Dying Animal’. There are many intimate scenes with nudity in this film. Elegy is an art film that would cater to limited people who have appetite for such slow and sentimental films. The title ‘Elegy’ denotes a type of mournful musical work.