A dead film
Ben Kingsley needs no endorsement about his acting, nor does Penelope Cruz for her beauty. If you go expecting only that much from Elegy, you won’t be disappointed. But, if you are looking for a good piece of cinema – then my suggestion would be to avoid the film.
To cut a long story short – Elegy disappoints. When you have someone like Kingsley and Cruz coming together on screen, you do expect more than just a run-of-the-mill film.
The film begins well. And, till interval manages to pull through decently. Post-interval it falters. Based on Phillip Roth’s novel – The Dying Animal – and directed by Spanish director Isabel Coixet, the film is quite a letdown.
The story of a Cultural Critic cum Professor’s carnal instincts and the way he ‘intellectually’ seduces his student with the only objective of sleeping with her, but is finally so consumed in passion that in his own words ‘he behaves like a 20-year-old’ – somehow fails to connect.
Till interval, it nonetheless manages to hold up, thanks to some good dialogues between Kingsley and his friend, played by Dennis Hopper. The love-making scenes between Cruz and Kingsley are mostly a celebration of Cruz’s beauty.
Post-interval, the film escalates into this melodrama-ridden plot. Heart-break and self-realizations and also a terminal illness – make it too boring a watch. In fact, you would be tempted to walk-off in the second half. And, for a film that is about 1 hour 50 minutes long, it just goes to show how the film literally drags. What could have really saved the film was to increase the pace of narration and of course, doing away with some melodrama. Because, sans these two elements you probably would have managed to emotionally connect with the film – as it was purported to be.
Could have been a beautiful celebration of romance. It failed.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
thats sad. I was hoping to catch it this week. I might still see it. Its rare to have films like this come to our theaters. I wonder how it got here. Usually its the big budget, low risk films.
Wanted to catch up on this one but oh oh now….