Erotic Movie: Elegy (2008)

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1.09.2012 | By: A. B.

Welcome to the beautiful, highly erotic, well-acted, tragic and masterful paraphrase of the cult story about Lolita.

The aged professor David Kepesh falls head over heels for his student Consuela.

Elegy is a movie which will excite even the most demanding viewers who don’t consider nudity and sex to be enough.

The excellent dramatic actress Patricia Clarkson plays the professor’s aged mistress.

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A movie which can be watched like an elegy

That is right, Elegy, a masterpiece which was badly and unjustly overlooked last year and could easily have gone after some Oscars, can be watched like an elegy, like a sad song, a lament, like a poem where the poet is mourning for something unrecoverable, something which he lost and can’t get back. But it is only in the second part of the movie, the part which is a stereotypical but wonderful paraphrase of Lolita, where the aged professor David Kepesh (the unique Ben Kingsley) gets the hots for an attractive student named Consuela (the wonderful Penelope Cruz), that the movie is elevated way above average and a masterpiece is created. Another gorgeous movie by female director Isabel Coixet, who (in 2003) gave us the unforgettable movie My Life Without Me, which is similar to our movie.

I adore your wonderful breasts

“I adore your breasts, they are one of the most beautiful things my eyes have ever seen,” an aged but still energetic David Kepesh says. He is somewhat like Humbert Humbert who falls head over heels in love for the first time in his life. He feels emotional attraction for the first time in his life. In the past it was always about physical attraction. It is true that she is thirty years younger than him, but she is intelligent enough to charm him. She becomes his muse and life partner. He is willing to forget about his many other women, including his constant mistress Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), for her. “Don’t be crazy, mate, use her just for sex, love isn’t for you” his best friend George O’Hearn (Dennis Hopper) explains to him. George has a wife to talk to and mistresses for sex. But our professor is truly in love. He might even be obsessed and smitten like a teenager, like a young man who has fallen in love with his teacher and not his student. She is his Lolita.

Hot and daring sexual scenes

It is true that the daring scenes of their sex and foreplay are a bit awkward because of the age difference between Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, but they still manage to create a very natural, interesting and passionate relationship which is believable and which could happen in exactly the same way in real life as well. Then we are faced with a reversal of fortune, which turns the erotica into an elegy, into a really sad story which will break your heart in the scene where professor Kepesh takes his camera in his hands and takes one last photograph of his muse. It is so powerful that you will have a hard time pulling yourself together. The scene is beautiful, charming, romantic, erotic and elegant, but still so sad that you will start crying. You will feel the suffering and destiny of the lovers who want a romantic comedy but get an elegy that would make even a stone cry. This is a first-class masterpiece, another My Life Without Me, a movie which was obviously too perfect to get any real distribution.

Surprising nudity

The fact that Penelope Cruz takes her clothes off really isn’t all that surprising because she has done this several times already, like in the movie Jamon Jamon and in other movies where the plot is concerned with love and men. It is more surprising that the actress Patricia Clarkson also takes her clothes off. The almost fifty year-old mistress of dramatisation and character acting had never done this before. This is the same as if Meryl Streep took her clothes off. Patricia not only took her clothes off, but she had sexual relations and surrendered to carnal pleasure without shame. But she doesn’t do this to shock and provoke the viewers, she does it because of the story and the movie which incorporates nudity and sexuality into the action very naturally and convincingly, which means that we believe everything we see.