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Professor of desire

A novelty: A film for adults
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 8th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Class and high marks. Penélope Cruz and Ben Kingsley put in excellent work.
Elegy


Directed by Isabel Coixet
With Penélope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard and Deborah Harry

If Michaela Pavlátová’s Děti noci is aimed squarely at teenagers and 20-year-olds, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy is a film strictly for adults.
Based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal (a title hardly given to marquee success), Elegy is just that, an elegiac reflection on aging and loss. It’s a sorrowful film, but one that also contains great moments of wry humor, a sardonic appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition. We are, after all, dying animals, raging against the dying of the light — singly, in our own styles.
Professor David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a literature and culture critic, rages on through denial. He occasionally accepts the limitations that time has saddled him with, but is more likely to forge on as if he were still a young buck, and a ruttish one at that.
As a charismatic professor, Kepesh has bedded his share of doe-eyed co-eds mesmerized by his brilliance, though growing political correctness on campus has harnessed his whims somewhat. He now patiently waits for his students to graduate before approaching them.
Kepesh is a true Rothian hero, a man with a powerful libido, something time has not yet tamed (one is reminded of Sophocles, who, upon reaching 80, felt relief at finally having his sexual appetite quelled). The drawn-out orgy of nameless, faceless students has had only one interruption, Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), a student from 15 years ago who has remained Kepesh’s only real commitment — though one based on compatibility rather than emotional need.
Emotion is not Kepesh’s forte. Its lack is what killed his early marriage, and what has embittered his adult son, Kenneth (Peter Sarsgaard). The closest he comes to fully committing to another human being is his great relationship with poet George O’Hearn (Dennis Hopper), a fellow satyr, and the sole person he dares bare his soul to. Then Consuela Castillo walks into his class.
Captivated by her beauty and Old World manners, Kepesh does something he’s seldom done: He woos her. In the midst of his efforts, he finds himself actually falling in love, truly caring for another human being. If that didn’t shock him enough, he also finds himself suffering from jealousy and becoming obsessive, to the point where he could botch the relationship.
What his love for Consuela (the luminous Penélope Cruz) also brings him is the first level assessment of himself as an old man, someone 30 years senior to the woman he adores. With that come other unexperienced feelings of being inadequate, perhaps even ludicrous. Just as Kepesh is suddenly willing to fully bond with a woman, all the other emotions that he’s retarded over the decades manifest themselves.
It will be a chore for adults to empathize with the protagonist of Děti noci, just as I think Elegy may baffle anyone who hasn’t yet reached the age of life when, statistically, there are less years ahead than behind. Not that statistics hold, something the film makes clear. Elegies are also written for the young.
Director Coixet has set a very adult pace for her film (the metronome becomes a potent symbol against speed). She is willing to allow scenes to be fully explored before moving to the next, much as she was in her haunting film of damaged love, La Vida secreta de las palabras, two years ago.
Elegy lingers over images and words at the rate of a piano movement by Satie — perhaps unspeakably slow for anyone weened on video games, but perfect for this very intimate drama. Some scenes take on the quality of a still life, but what better way to visually communicate a man fully awakening to the world?
Coixet is also an actor’s director. She delights in letting her cast own the frames, rather than continually reminding an audience that she’s in control. Because of this, she’s pulled some remarkable performances from her actors.
Kingsley is an exceptional Kepesh (an Oxford transplant version of the character, unlike Roth’s native American). Kingsley specializes in two distinct types: the man of great feeling (Betrayal) and the ruthless monster (Sexy Beast, Lucky Number Slevin). In Elegy, he’s able to tap into both to create Kepesh, a man with not a little ice in his veins who nonetheless startles himself by his ability to love.
Clarkson is superb as the aging former student, as much a fellow refugee from commitment as Kepesh. Hopper, seldom allowed to play an intellectual, or even a character of some fragility, as he’s given here, is equally strong.
Elegy, however, is Cruz’s film. Ever since Almodovar’s Volver, Cruz has proven to be an actor of great depth, something Hollywood never appreciated. Hopper’s O’Hearn has a line in the film where he says that “beautiful women are invisible; we’re so dazzled by the outside that we never make it inside.”
Cruz is fully inside Consuela, and she allows us in too. It’s a radiant performance in so many ways — natural, uninhibited and laced with an affecting warmth and sadness.
Elegy, more than anything, becomes a paean to Cruz’s great talent.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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