Elegy (M)

This romantic meditation on love is a mournful, plaintive lament about whether enduring love between two people more than 30 years apart in age is possible.

Ben Kingsley plays celebrity college professor David, who prefers affairs to commitment and sets his sights on Consuela (Penelope Cruz), a much younger, attractive Cuban woman who is his student.

Sexual conquest, however, leads to obsession, jealousy and self-doubts in David that a woman as beautiful and young as Consuela would ever want to spend much time with a man as old as he is.

Kingsley and Cruz (whose baring of her breasts proves integral to the story) give commendable performances, with solid support from Dennis Hopper as David's womanising, married poet friend, Patricia Clarkson as David's occasional lover and Peter Sarsgard as his married physician son who's angry at his father's abandonment of him as a child, but now is having an affair of his own.

It's based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal.

This sombre, elegant, melancholy tale is strangely unmoving, for all its poignancy.

- © Fairfax NZ News